in the least accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte’s genius.  It merely suggests with all possible humility a likely cause of its release.  Anyhow, it is a theory that does Charlotte’s genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable to any other.  It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged her sister’s influence, that she was indeed unaware of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between them, the less likely was she to have been aware.  In the second place, it is not claimed that Wuthering Heights was such an influence as the “sojourn in Brussels” is said to have been—­that it “made Miss Bronte an author”.  It is not claimed that if there had been no Wuthering Heights and no Emily Bronte, there would have been no Jane Eyre; for to me nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened, Charlotte’s genius would have found its way.

Charlotte’s genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte’s nature that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil.

In Shirley she revolts from the passion of Jane Eyre.  She seems to have written it to prove that there are other things.  She had been stung by The Quarterly’s attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse thing that had been said.  And yet not for a moment was she “influenced” by her reviewers.  It was more in defiance than in submission that she answered them with Shirley. Shirley was an answer to every criticism that had yet been made.  In Shirley she forsook the one poor play of hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle between capital and labour, all are there.  The book opens with a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not breakers of the marriage law.  In sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates.  It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that she paints.  A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Bronte has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.

That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte’s own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul.  There was no career for any woman but marriage.  If she missed it she missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a woman.  What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father’s or her brother’s house.  If she had a father or a brother there was no escape for her from dependence on the male;