There is something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the nonsense out of Charlotte.  Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the Brontesque.  When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing.  When Jane Eyre appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to posterity.  There is a touch of condescension in her praise.  She is evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte.  “It seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book.”  “You are very different from me,” she says, “in having no doctrine to preach.  It is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production.”  She is thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John Rivers.  “A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a quality for St. John.  It’s a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such a man.”  As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte Bronte’s intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what, beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend.  She was a woman of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Bronte what Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen.  She did not keep her letters.  She burnt them “in a fit of caution”, which may have been just as well.

But Mary Taylor is important.  She had, among her more tender qualities, an appalling frankness.  It was she who told poor little Charlotte that she was very ugly.  Charlotte never forgot it.  You can feel in her letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of the shock.  She said afterwards:  “You did me a great deal of good, Polly,” by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.

Her friends all began by trying to do her good.  Even Ellen Nussey tried.  Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being “tempted by the fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance”, and in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended.  “Oh, Ellen,” Charlotte writes, “do you think I could be offended by any good advice you may give me?” She thanks her heartily, and loves her “if possible all the better for it”.  Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell her of her faults and “cease flattering her”.  Charlotte very sensibly refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her own heart-searchings begin.  They are mainly tiresome, but there is a flash of revelation in her reply to “the note you sent me with the umbrella”.  “My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face