At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her.  She must have seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done violence to her destiny.

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned even the tragedy of her family to account.  Everything conspired to keep her there.  The school was given up.  She tells why.  “It is on Papa’s account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight.  I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to pursue selfish interests of my own.  With the help of God I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait.”

And with the help of God she waited.

There are three significant entries in Emily’s sealed paper for eighteen-forty-five.  “Now I don’t desire a school at all, and none of us have any great longing for it.”  “I am quite contented for myself ... seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring that everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.”  “I have plenty of work on hand, and writing....”  This, embedded among details of an incomparable innocence:  “We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost the hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless dead.”

And Anne, as naive as a little nun, writes in her sealed paper:  “Emily is upstairs ironing.  I am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender.  Papa is in the parlour.  Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen.  Keeper and Flossy are, I do not know where.  Little Dick is hopping in his cage.”  And then, “Emily ... is writing some poetry....  I wonder what it is about?”

That is the only clue to the secret that is given.  These childlike diaries are full of the “Gondal Chronicles",[A] an interminable fantasy in which for years Emily collaborated with Anne.  They flourished the “Gondal Chronicles” in each other’s faces, with positive bravado, trying to see which could keep it up the longer.  Under it all there was a mystery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, “Best plays were secret plays,” and the sisters kept their best hidden.  And then suddenly the “Gondal Chronicles” were dropped, the mystery broke down.  All three of them had been writing poems; they had been writing poems for years.  Some of Emily’s dated from her first exile at Roe Head.  Most of Anne’s sad songs were sung in her house of bondage.  From Charlotte, in her Brussels period, not a line.

[Footnote A:  See supra, pp. 193 to 209.]

But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return and found her free, she wrote nearly all her maturer poems (none of them were excessively mature):  she wrote The Professor, and close upon The Professor, Jane Eyre.  In the same term that found her also, poor child, free, and at Haworth, Anne wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.