the daughter of a clergyman in the little village of Haworth, and that the literary sensation of the day found its source in a nervous, shrinking, awkward, plain, delicate young creature of thirty-one years of age, whose life, with the exception of two years, had been spent on the bleak and dreary moorlands of Yorkshire, and for the most part in the narrow confines of a grim gray stone parsonage.  There she had lived a pinched and meagre little life, full of sadness and self-denial, with two sisters more delicate than herself, a dissolute brother, and a father her only parent,—­a stern and forbidding father.  This was no genial environment for an author, even if helpful to her vivid imagination.  Nor was it a temporary condition; it was a permanent one.  Nearly all the influences in Charlotte Bronte’s life were such as these, which would seem to cramp if not to stifle sensitive talent.  Her brother Branwell (physically weaker than herself, though unquestionably talented, and for a time the idol and hope of the family) became dissipated, irresponsible, untruthful, and a ne’er-do-weel, and finally yielding to circumstances, ended miserably a life of failure.

But Charlotte Bronte’s nature was one of indomitable courage, that circumstances might shadow but could not obscure.  Out of the meagre elements of her narrow life she evolved works that stand among the imperishable things of English literature.  It is a paradox that finds its explanation only in a statement of natural sources, primitive, bardic, the sources of the early epics, the sources of such epics as Caedmon and Beowulf bore.  She wrote from a sort of necessity; it was in obedience to the commanding authority of an extraordinary genius,—­a creative power that struggled for expression,—­and much of her work deserves in the best and fullest sense the term “inspired.”

[Illustration:  Charlotte Bronte]

The facts of her life are few in number, but they have a direct and significant bearing on her work.  She was born at Thornton, in the parish of Bradford, in 1816.  Four years later her father moved to Haworth, to the parsonage now indissolubly associated with her name, and there Mr. Bronte entered upon a long period of pastorate service, that only ended with his death.  Charlotte’s mother was dead.  In 1824 Charlotte and two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, went to a school at Cowan’s Bridge.  It was an institution for clergymen’s children, a vivid picture of which appears in ‘Jane Eyre.’  It was so badly managed and the food was so poor that many of the children fell sick, among them Maria Bronte, who died in 1825.  Elizabeth followed her a few months later, and Charlotte returned to Haworth, where she remained for six years, then went to school at Roe Head for a period of three years.  She was offered the position of teacher by Miss Wooler, the principal at Roe Head, but considering herself unfit to teach, she resolved to go to Brussels to study French.  She spent two years there, and it was there that her intimate and misconstrued friendship for M. Heger developed.  The incidents of that period formed the material of a greater portion of her novel ‘Villette,’ filled twenty-two volumes of from sixty to one hundred pages of fine writing, and consisted of some forty complete novelettes or other stories and childish “magazines.”