This interdisciplinary book engages with material culture, literary biography, historical scholarship, feminist theory, and dress studies. It explores questions of identity — emotional, societal, and physical — and shows how garments embody both inner states and external realities. Brontë’s clothing, her novels, letters, and drawings each offer distinct perspectives on self-presentation, and together they reveal how material and textual evidence can enrich one another.

The biography also incorporates scientific practices, specifically Raman spectroscopy and SEM/EDX, to investigate the chemical and structural properties of Brontë’s surviving garments. These methods expose the material histories embedded in the fabrics, which can then be placed in dialogue with sartorial, literary and historical sources. By combining cultural, creative, and scientific approaches, the book demonstrates how clothing can reshape our understanding of an individual and the often fast-changing world in which they lived.

My path into this project began with a desire to bring together my interests and expertise in literary studies, history, and dress history — fields that sometimes intersect, but which I wanted to place in sustained dialogue. I read English at Oxford, before going on to an MA that placed particular emphasis on dress history, where my dissertation examined Jane Austen’s management of clothing as depicted in her letters. That project convinced me that clothing could be read as a form of narrative, revealing how writers negotiated identity and self-presentation in everyday life. I later received a Wolfson Scholarship in the Humanities to pursue doctoral studies in History, which gave me the opportunity to deepen this interdisciplinary approach.

 Charlotte Brontë quickly stood out as a figure whose novels and letters are deeply concerned with identity and self-presentation, yet whose large collection of extant clothing had been almost entirely overlooked. The survival of so many garments offered a rare chance to let clothes speak alongside a huge body of more traditional sources. That realization, that Brontë’s wardrobe could open new windows onto her life, set me on a fascinating, nine-year research road to writing a biography that has proved itself both intimate and expansive.