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Updated: June 16, 2025
It must be so splendid to know that one has such power, and to hear people own that one possesses a "masculine intellect"! I don't care for most women's novels, but hers are immense; don't you think so, Mrs Bhaer? asked the girl with the big forehead, and torn braid on her skirt. 'Yes; but they don't thrill me as little Charlotte Bronte's books do.
Some one once made an objection in Charlotte Bronté's presence to that part of 'Jane Eyre' in which she hears Rochester's voice calling to her at a great crisis in her life, he being many miles distant from her at the time. Charlotte caught her breath and replied in a low voice: "But it is a true thing; it really happened."
His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed every now and then to struggle back to life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere's face his look lightened. Towards the last he said something we none of us caught; but your husband thought it was a line from Emily Brontë's "Hymn," which he said to them last Sunday in lecture. He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her face.
Effort was lacking, perhaps, in Emily Bronte's life. But it is difficult to pass judgment on an entire existence; and here there were much to be said of the devotion wherewith she sacrificed the best years of her youth to an undeserving, though unfortunate, brother.
Birrell, endeavouring to account for Charlotte Bronte's hostility to the Belgians, who had been uncommonly kind to her, says that she "had never any patience" with Catholicism. The remark invites the reply of the Papal chamberlain to Prince Herbert Bismarck, when that nobleman, being in attendance upon the Emperor, pushed rudely and unbidden into Pope Leo's audience chamber.
No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power of self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she was so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why she could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend." That was how she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "Savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais
The quick succession of events at that time called forth the following expression of Miss Bronte's thoughts on the subject, in a letter addressed to Miss Wooler, and dated March 31st.
Shirley may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book. Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, "the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be.
I shall now quote from a valuable letter which I have received from "Mary," one of these early friends; distinct and graphic in expression, as becomes a cherished associate of Charlotte Bronte's. The time referred to is her first appearance at Roe Head, on January 19th, 1831. "I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable.
And here, almost directly above her sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record, its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's at the age of eighty-five, is the last.
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