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Around the figure of Emily Bronte there is none of that clamour and confusion.  She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever her secret and her mystery.  By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips and of theorists has passed her by.  She has no legend or hardly any.  So completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to write the Life of Emily Bronte she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell’s meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the hearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written about Charlotte.

There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte found her shelter behind Charlotte’s fame; but she was protected most of all by the unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and of her genius.  Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in that preface to Wuthering Heights, which stands as her last vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a curious reservation and reluctance.  You feel that Emily’s genius inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems.  Between six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are two of Emily’s.  They tell little or nothing.  And there was that diary she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that are happening in her family.  There never was a diary wherein the soul of the diarist was so well concealed.

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture, we see Emily Bronte more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte now.  Though hardly anything is known of her, what is known is authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her:  from Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage.  Even of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image.  The lines are fewer, but they are more vivid.  You see her tall and slender, in her rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile adolescent.  Shirley, the “bete fauve”, is Emily civilized.  You see her head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply, caught up with a comb.  You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high, slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the “kind, kindling, liquid eyes” that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.