we said of all that” (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering Charlotte Bronte’s thought), “endeavouring to persuade ourselves!  Charlotte Bronte had the courage of her opinions.  It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted.  It was not a living, but their share in life....  Miss Bronte herself said correct things” (observe that insincerity is insinuated here) “about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines.” (Why, you naturally wonder, should it have been?) “They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world and link the generations each to each.” (And very proper of them, too.) “In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected” (!) “and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path.  Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place.”

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Bronte was writing in the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw around her; writing, without any “philosophy” or “covert conviction”, in the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of independence that a woman had.  It would have been marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have conceived and created Shirley Keeldar.  As for poor little Lucy with her two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the true.  Besides, Miss Bronte’s “philosophy” was exactly the opposite to that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads Shirley.  In these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned, a thorough revolutionary.

But this is not the worst.  Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her victim.  “Poor Charlotte Bronte!  She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life.” (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Bronte’s life.) “Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers.  There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over.”