Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick’s old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that Charlotte Bronte was not fond of children.  Even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon her head, pauses and wonders:  had she any love for children?  He finds in her “a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship”; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, “the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo”.  “The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth,” he says, “had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality.”  There was little Georgette in Villette, to say nothing of Polly, and there was Adele in Jane Eyre.  But Mr. Swinburne had forgotten about little Georgette.  Like George Henry Lewes he is “well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely written chapters in Shirley a chapter which could hardly have been written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility”; so difficult was it for him to believe in “the dread and repulsion felt by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek charm of the human tiger that had begotten it”.  And so he crowns her with all crowns but that of “love for children”.  He is still tender to her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow and a certain shame.

Mr. Birrell follows him.  “Miss Bronte,” he says with confidence, “did not care for children.  She had no eye for them.  Hence it comes about that her novel-children are not good.”  He is moved to playful sarcasm when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three “Miss Bronte suffered a keen disappointment”.  She went to Scotland with some friends who took their baby with them.  The parents thought the baby was ill when it wasn’t, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up her holiday.  “All on account of a baby,” says Mr. Birrell, and refers you to Charlotte’s letter on the subject, implying that it was cold-blooded.  The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr. Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote “had any evil consequences followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself”.  You are to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well, for Charlotte “did not care for children”.

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry.  She was a woman and knew better.