It must be admitted that Jane Eyre was an easy prey for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great qualities lay deep.  Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and obviously faulty.  What was more, the passion of the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author’s austere respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte of glorifying passion they praise her unaware.  Her glory is that she did glorify it.  Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion.  Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing.  A woman’s gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another.  Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding.  To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant.  Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy.  Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman; and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously without it.  And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding’s view.  Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion.  She gave it to one vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have anything more to do with these young women.  She was not alone in her inability to “tackle passion”.  No respectable mid-Victorian novelist could, when passion had so bad a name.

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Bronte took and lifted up.  She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, “the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion”.  She made it, this spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no sensual charm.  Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith’s large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.

It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified passion.  The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all.