As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte’s biographers have been rather hard on them.  Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them “coarse employers”.  They were certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad little governess.  It was, I imagine, Charlotte’s alien, enigmatic face that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her.  She said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not “intend to know her”.  She might have added that if she had intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly have known her.  And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Bronte “was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded from the family circle”, that was simply their robust view of the paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick.  She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn’t know how to keep order in the nursery.  Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe.  Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Bronte.  Miss Bronte had a gift.  She could sew.  She could sew beautifully.  Her stitching, if you would believe it, was a dream.  And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Bronte’s one talent was not lodged in her useless.  So Charlotte sat alone all evening in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus:  “She cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and above all things, dolls to dress.”  And Mrs. Sidgwick complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all time, that she had said, “Love the governess, my dear!” when her little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte’s at the dinner-table, and cried “I love ’ou, Miss Bronte.”  It was the same little, impulsive boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit her.

No wonder that Miss Bronte’s one and only “pleasant afternoon” was when Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him from behind.