and if she had none, if there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable.  And the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things, the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence.  Religion was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life.  A woman in these horrible conditions was only half alive.  She had no energies, no passions, no enthusiasms.  Convention drained her of her life-blood.  What was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and sensibility for the nerves of vision.  This only applies, of course, to the average woman.

Charlotte Bronte was born with a horror of the world that had produced this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies.  She sent out Jane Eyre to purify it with her passion.  She sent out Shirley to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect.  Little Jane was a fiery portent.  Shirley was a prophecy.  She is modern to her finger-tips, as modern as Meredith’s great women:  Diana, or Clara Middleton, or Carinthia Jane.  She was born fifty years before her time.

This is partly owing to her creator’s prophetic insight, partly to her sheer truth to life.  For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of Emily Bronte who was born before her time.

It is Emily Bronte’s spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of this vast novel.  It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Bronte in her time.  Charlotte has given her the “wings that wealth can give”, and they do not matter.  She has also given her the wings of Emily’s adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life.

“A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins; unmingled—­untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed:  the pure gift of God to His creature, the free dower of Nature to her child.  This joy gives her experience of a genii-life.  Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it.”

“Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it—­” That was the secret of Emily’s greatness, of her immeasurable superiority to her sad sisters.