Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this.  He maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it.  But I would go farther.  I am convinced that not only does that passage bear that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte’s aunt died, and Charlotte became the head of her father’s household.  She left her father’s house in a time of trouble, prompted by “an irresistible impulse” towards what we should now call self-development.  Charlotte, more than two years later, in a moment of retrospective morbidity, called it “selfish folly”.  In that dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her home required her.  And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that her home did require her.  Equally she felt that either Emily or she had got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn’t possibly be Emily it must be she.  The problem would have been quite simple even for Charlotte—­but she wanted to go.  Therefore her tender conscience vacillated.  When you remember that Charlotte Bronte’s conscience was, next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicate part of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion, her words are sufficiently charged with meaning.  A passion for M. Heger is, psychologically speaking, superfluous.  You can prove anything by detaching words from their context.  The letter from which that passage has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey’s suggestions of work for Charlotte.  Charlotte says “any project which infers the necessity of my leaving home is impracticable to me.  If I could leave home I should not be at Haworth now.  I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing, earning nothing—­a very bitter knowledge it is at moments—­but I see no way out of the mist”; and so on for another line or two, and then:  “These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my conscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release.”  And then, the passage quoted ad nauseam, to support the legend of M. Heger.

A “total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind”.  This letter is dated October 1846—­more than two years since her return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four.  In those two years her father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwell achieved his destiny.  The passage refers unmistakably to events at Haworth.  It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier letter.  Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis—­torn between duty to herself and duty to her people.  She asks Charlotte’s advice and Charlotte gives judgment:  “The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest.”  The sacrifice, observe, not of happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development of self.  It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that she went to Brussels for.