For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Bronte.  We would have no right to touch it, to approach it, were it not that other people have already violated all that was most sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a defaced and disfigured Charlotte Bronte.  I believe that this love of children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to Charlotte’s nature.  We are face to face here, not with a want in her, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works, because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average comfortable women who become happy mothers.  It has even its perversions, when love hardly knows itself from hate.  Such love demands before all things possession.  It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.  I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born and possessed by other women.  It must have been agony to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were not to “love the governess”.

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient.  There is little Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat:  “Little Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her familiar term, ‘Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!’ till my heart ached.” ...  “I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat.  To-night she would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her little arms round my neck.  Her clasp and the nestling action with which she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender pain.”

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs. White’s nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote:  “By dint of nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me.  I suspect myself of growing rather fond of it.”  Years later she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, after staying with her:  “Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia?  She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her.”

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was “a strong mutual attraction” between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Bronte.  “The child,” she says, “would steal her little hand into Miss Bronte’s scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently unobserved caress.”  May I suggest that children do not steal their little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them?  Their instinct is infallible.