Frederika Macdonald was a literary biographer and the author of several works on the French Enlightenment, as well as biographies of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Jacques Rousseau and at least one novel. In 1859 Macdonald had been a pupil at the Pensionnat Heger, where Charlotte Bronte had been first a student and then a teacher, which gave Macdonald a personal acquaintance with both Madame and Monsieur Heger and inspired her with a particular interest in Charlotte. When Charlotte's love letters to Monsieur Heger, previously believed to have been destroyed, were published in 1913, Macdonald was the first biographer to use excerpts from them, in her The Secret of Charlotte Bronte .
From the guide to the Frederika MacDonald Letter, 1913, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)
