It is such immortal things that make the difference between Jane Eyre and The Professor.  So immeasurable is that difference that it almost justifies the theorist in assuming an “experience” to account for it, an experience falling between the dates of The Professor and Jane Eyre.  Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the researcher.  Charlotte’s letters are an unbroken record of those two years that followed her return from Brussels.  Her life is laid bare in its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of “experience”.

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period.  If the researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his flair for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense of proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in the face, simple, obvious, inevitable.  But miss it he certainly did.  Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance that Charlotte should have read Wuthering Heights before she wrote Jane Eyre.  And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that.  Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let imagination go.  Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced imagination from the real.  But Emily knew none of these cold deliberations born of fear. Wuthering Heights was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness.  It is not possible that Charlotte, of all people, should have read Wuthering Heights without a shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her genius by her self-repression.  Emily had dared to be herself; she had not been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she had accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting herself go.  And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, “That is what I ought to have done.  That is what I will do next time.”  And next time she did it.  The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such experiences that a great writer’s life is largely made.  And if you must have an influence to account for Jane Eyre, there is no need to go abroad to look for it.  There was influence enough in her own home.  These three Brontes, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily’s, prevailed.  To be sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark from Emily that kindled Anne.  As for Charlotte, her genius must have quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of Wuthering Heights.  This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the merit of its modesty.  It is not offered as