“Mr. ——­ be hanged!  I never thought very well of him, and I am much disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute.  I have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained?—­it is not worth while.”

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey.  “Ten years ago I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington for a married man.  I should have certainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single instead of double.  Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are founded on common sense.  I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay—­cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to” (I regret to say that Charlotte wrote) “to hook a husband.”

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his daughter Louisa.  And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman.  “Your daughters—­no more than your sons—­should be a burden on your hands.  Your daughters—­as much as your sons—­should aim at making their way honourably through life.  Do you not wish to keep them at home?  Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school.  Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart.  It is doubtless well—­very well—­if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature....  Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...?  How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family?  In that case I should have no world at all.  As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me still.  I wish all your daughters—­I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive.”

Whatever the views of Charlotte Bronte’s heroines may or may not have been, these were her own views—­sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate.  Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered with her theory.  They are certainly not the views of a woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing.  Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Bronte, what with her writing and her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them.  Window-gazing of all things!  Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte’s character.