Of course women have worked themselves to death in their passionate devotion to art.  So have men.  Women have starved to death in garrets, their fine efforts rejected by those that buy, and sell again to an uncertain public.  So have men.  The dreariest anecdotes of England and France, so rich in letters, are of great men-geniuses who died young for want of proper nourishment or recognition, or who struggled on to middle-age in a bitterness of spirit that corroded their high endowment.  I do not recall that any first-rate women writers have died for want of recognition, possibly because until now they have been few and far between.  The Brontes died young, but mainly because they lived in the midst of a damp old churchyard and inherited tubercular tendencies.  The graves and old box tombs crowd the very walls of the parsonage, and are so thick you hardly can walk between them.  I spent a month in the village of Haworth, but only one night in the village inn at the extreme end of the churchyard; I could read the inscriptions on the tombs from my windows.

Charlotte had immediate recognition even from such men as Thackeray, and if the greater Emily had to wait for Swinburne and posterity it was inherited consumption that carried her off in her youth.  Although much has been made of their poverty I don’t think they were so badly off for their times.  The parsonage is a well-built stone house, their father had his salary, and the villagers told me that the three girls looked after the poor in hard winters, often supplying whole families with coal.  Of course they led lives of a maddening monotony, but they were neither hungry nor bitter, and at least two of them developed a higher order of genius than was possible to the gifted Jane Austin in her smug life of middle-class plenty, and, to my mind, far more hampering restrictions.

Even if the Brontes had been sufficiently in advance of their times to “light out” and seek adventure and development in the great world, their low state of health would have kept them at home.  So impressed was I with the (to a Californian) terrible pictures of poverty in which the Brontes were posed by their biographers that I grew up with the idea that one never could develop a gift or succeed in the higher manner unless one lived in a garret and half starved.  I never had the courage to try the regimen, but so deep was the impression that I never have been able to work except in austere surroundings, and I have worked in most abominably uncomfortable quarters with an equanimity that was merely the result of the deathless insistence of an old impression sunk deep into a mind then plastic.

Let me hasten to add that many successful authors work in the most luxurious quarters imaginable.  It is all a matter of temperament, or, it may be, of accident.  Moreover this outer evidence of prosperity makes a subtle appeal to the snobbery of the world and to a certain order of critic, by no means to be despised.  Socially and in the arts we Americans are the least democratic of people, partly because we are so damnably unsure of ourselves; and if I were beginning my career to-day I doubt if I should be so unbusiness-like as to take the lowly Brontes as a model.