Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again.  Though she was not one of those who said Charlotte Bronte was not fond of children, though she would have died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her, Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his.  She suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of matrimonial dreams.  Her picture (the married woman’s picture) is of an undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly in a parsonage.  She would have us believe that from morning till night, from night till morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage thought of nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the casual visitor.  The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was “one subject”, she says, “which Charlotte Bronte had at her command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of which she has made so remarkable an exposition.  The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence—­this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best.  Was there no help for it?  Must the women wait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves!

“The position,” she goes on, “in itself so tragic, is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed.  Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment.  It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly genuine and true.” (This is more than can be said of Mrs. Oliphant’s view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was Emily Bronte.  It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far.  “Note,” she says, “there was nothing sensual about these young women.  It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them:  of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only women understand.”  Yet she characterizes their “outcry” as “indelicate”.  “All very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establishing their independence.  How much have