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Novelist Tracy Chevalier and biographer Claire Harman look back at the life and legacy of Charlotte Bronte on the 200th anniversary of her birth in 1816.

The bicentenaries of the Bronte siblings are being marked by a five-year programme of events, starting with the celebration of Charlotte in 2016. Events include a new exhibition, Charlotte Great and Small, authored by Chevalier and due to open in February at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Chevalier is also editing a collection of short stories influenced by Charlotte’s writing called Reader, I Married Him. Meanwhile, Harman has written a new biography, Charlotte Bronte: A Life, which paints Charlotte as a literary visionary, trailblazer of feminism and the driving force behind the whole family. Chevalier and Harman look back at the life of Charlotte and ask what her legacy is today.

Chevalier’s 2000 novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, has sold more than four million copies and was made into a Bafta and Oscar-nominated film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. She talks about her most recent novel, At the Edge of the Orchard, at another festival event. Harman is an award-winning biographer. Her first book, Sylvia Townsend Warner, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and she has also written Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane’s Fame.

Here they talk to journalist and writer Lucy Atkins, author of the novels, The Missing One and The Other Child, and of a number of non-fiction books.

This event is part of the festival’s women in society programme sponsored by HSBC.