remains dim in her own story and in the classic “Lives”.  We only know that she was the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty.  She had thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters’ sallow, that must have given some ominous hint of fever.  This delicate thing was broken on the wheel of life.  They say of Anne perpetually that she was “gentle”.  In Charlotte’s sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking point, she was always as gentle as they say.  But you never see her in any moment of revolt.  Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay.  That little raising of the head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of Agnes Grey.

There is no piety in that plaint.  It is purely pagan; the cry of youth cheated of its desire.  Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that left her undesired.  Her tremulous, expectant womanhood was cheated.  She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in Agnes Grey.  She was cheated of her innocent dream.

And by an awful irony her religion failed her.  She knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions.  She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations.  Her tender conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her brother’s degradation.

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard.  It was Anne at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable premonitions.

That wretched story is always cropping up again.  The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called “that mature and wicked woman”, has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense could clear her.  But the slander is perpetually revived.  It has always proved too much for the Bronte biographers.  Madame Duclaux published it again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell’s retractation.  You would have thought that Branwell might have been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well.  But no, they will not let him rest.  Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well.  M. Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontes, thinks and maintains against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell’s madness.  He will not give up the sordid tragedy a trois.  He thinks he knows what Anne thought of Branwell’s behaviour, and what awful secret she was hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.  He argues that Anne Bronte saw and heard things, and that her testimony is not to be set aside.