For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age.  Mr. Leslie Stephen said that, “Miss Bronte’s sense of humour was but feeble.”  It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists.  But as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is almost a premonition.  And her attitude was by no means that of the foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue.  There was no necessity.  She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all.  Twice in her life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she chose “dependence upon coarse employers” before matrimony.  She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour.  To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied thus:  “It has always been my habit to study the character of those among whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife.  The character should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride.  As for me you do not know me....”  She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the prospect of Stonegappe before her.  For she had not, and could not have for him, “that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband”.  Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent with violent and unremitting regularity through the post.  He represented to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest.  But he offended her fastidiousness.  She was sorry for the little man with his little newspaper, and that was all.  She refused several times the man she ultimately married.  He served a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion.  She describes her engaged state as “very calm, very expectant.  What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order.  I trust to love my husband.  I am grateful for his tender love for me....  Providence offers me this destiny.  Doubtless then it is the best for me.”

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant’s Charlotte Bronte, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of matrimony.

I do not say that Charlotte Bronte had not what is called a “temperament”; her genius would not have been what it was without it; she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every turn.

The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough.  And had they gone no farther they would not have mattered much.  They would at least have left Charlotte Bronte’s genius to its own mystery.