The Quarterly, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, “hurry on a frock and shawl”.  The reasoning passed.  Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as any parson’s daughter.  Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, Currer Bell had provided her dowagers with “vast white wrappers” on the second night alarm.  And, after all, the sex of The Quarterly reviewer itself remains a problem.  Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous article.  You may say there were at least three.  There was, first, the genial reviewer of Vanity Fair, who revels in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in the wickedness of Jane.  Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you get a “black-marble clergyman” on Jane Eyre.

“We have said,” says this person, “that this was the picture of a natural heart.  This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of the book.  Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle the eyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundation on which it rests.  It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself....  She has inherited the worst sin of our fallen nature—­the sin of pride.”

Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility.  The style, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank.  He does “not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has written Jane Eyre”.

Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; and then, suddenly again, you come on a report on the “Condition of Governesses”, palpably drawn up by a third person.  For years Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurd performance, for she was known to have written the review on Vanity Fair.  What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all honesty to praise Jane Eyre.  Then some infuriated person interfered and stopped her.  The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there.  Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness and respectability.  So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman’s hand that dealt the blow.

If Charlotte Bronte did not feel the effect of it to the end of her life, she certainly suffered severely at the time.  It was responsible for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been wiser to have left alone.