“I feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude.  I had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what could be desired from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce.  It is not so.  Even intellect, even imagination will not dispense with the ray of domestic cheerfulness, with the gentle spur of family discussions.  Late in the evening and all through the nights, I fall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the past—­to memory, and memory is both sad and relentless.  This will never do, and will produce no good.  I tell you this that you may check false anticipations.  You cannot help me, and must not trouble yourself in any shape to sympathise with me.  It is my cup, and I must drink it as others do theirs.”

It would be difficult to create a picture of more poignant suffering; yet she was at this time a famous writer.  She had published Jane Eyre and Shirley, and on her visits to London, to her hospitable publisher, had found herself welcomed, honoured, feted.  The great lions of the literary world had flocked eagerly to meet her.  Even these simple festivities were accompanied by a deadly sense of strain, anxiety, and exhaustion.  Mrs. Gaskell describes how a little later she met Charlotte Bronte at a quiet country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced from tolerable health to a bad nervous headache by the announcement that they were going to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at a neighbour’s house—­ the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming to her.

But in spite of this agonising susceptibility and vulnerability, there is never the least touch either of sentimentality or self-pity about Charlotte Bronte.  She stuck to her duty and faced life with an infinity of patient courage.  One of her friends said of her that no one she had ever known had sacrificed more to others, or done it with a fuller consciousness of what she was sacrificing.  If duty and affection bade her act, no sense of weakness or of inclination had any power over her.  She was afraid of life, but she stood up to it; she was never crushed or broken.  Consider the circumstances under which she began to write Jane Eyre.  She had written her novel The Professor, and it was returned to her nine several times, by publisher after publisher.  Her father was threatened with blindness.  She had taken him to Manchester for an operation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to nurse him.  The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with a polite refusal.  That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane Eyre.  Later on too, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she had begun Shirley, and she finished it after the deaths of her sisters.  She was perfectly merciless to herself, saw no reason why she should be spared any sorrow or suffering or ill-health, but looked upon it all as a stern but not unjust discipline.  She had