The Key to the BrontË Works is the absolutely necessary companion volume to Charlotte BrontË's Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor, and Villette. Without it the reader cannot know the real Currer Bell and her people, or see her works as they were to herself. Great indeed and continuous has been the task of writing this volume: a comprehension of my duty to law and literature, to posterity and to Charlotte BrontË, set aside any other consideration. It could be no compliment to my learned and distinguished subscribers to assume importance would attach to The Key to the BrontË Works were the volume a mere skimming of extant BrontË biography, albeit that has its province of interest. The Key to the BrontË Works, I repeat, is the only book which shows us the life and works of Charlotte BrontË as intimately known to herself. Herein is my task accomplished; herewith is my reward. To quote my words from a private correspondence with Sir Charles Holroyd, Kt., Director of the National Gallery, London:—

The utmost possible interest attaches to my sensational evidence, now first showing Charlotte BrontË to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights, a book many have declared "the finest work of genius written by a woman," and some look upon as "one of the greatest novels in our or any other literature." In view of my evidence it will be impossible hereafter to convince the world that Charlotte BrontË did not write Wuthering Heights. The Key to the BrontË Works in his hands, every reader is an expert upon the subject. By resort to each indexed reference to Charlotte BrontË's methods I have discovered, and named Methods I. and II., sensational ratification of all I say hereon will be found.

It will presently seem incredible the chief argument hitherto advanced against my assertion that Charlotte BrontË wrote Wuthering Heights was that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are "totally dissimilar in style, thought, etc.," for my evidence is proof absolute to the opposite. A recent writer on the BrontËs[1] says Wuthering Heights contains nothing whatsoever biographically, or in any way, suggestive of Emily BrontË and her personality, and admits upon the other hand that the characteristic of Charlotte BrontË's writing is her full and intimate self-revelation of the incidents of her own life. Nothing can recall these words. They are a frank, or an ingenuous, statement of irrefutable fact; and though the writer did not journey to the logical conclusion, it is well he is associated with this fundamental admission. The same significant truth is voiced still more recently by another writer, who says: "Wuthering Heights reveals nothing of Emily BrontË. Not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring" Emily[2].

Much detached yet valuable and interesting evidence I have omitted for the sake of clearness, but it has aided me in regard to the final discoveries I now present, and is ready further to substantiate my conclusions. One of these detached pieces of evidence shows that the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw—the two lovers who at the close of Wuthering Heights become teacher and pupil—latterly were to Charlotte BrontË herself and M. HÉger. Apparently she did not wish to end Wuthering Heights without a picture of reconciled relations between two characters who could present a phase of M. HÉger and herself. The teacher and pupil relations between Miss BrontË and M. HÉger were most dear and gladdening to her memory. We have a glimpse of them in Villette, Shirley, and in The Professor, Chapter XIX., where Crimsworth is reading a book with Francis Evans Henri, whom he is teaching to read and pronounce English. These two characters represent M. HÉger and Charlotte BrontË; and Miss BrontË taught M. HÉger to read and pronounce English out of her own favourite old books, "consecrated to her by other associations," to quote her own words in Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXI., though often in The Professor she alternates the position of the characters by an interchange of the sexes, a method of Miss BrontË I have discovered and termed her Method I. Let the reader peruse carefully the scene in The Professor in the light of my reference to EugÈne Sue and Charlotte BrontË's old copy in English of The Imitation of Christ at Brussels, and in the light of the "reading and pronouncing" scenes in Chapters XXX., XXXI., and XXXII., of Wuthering Heights;

also:—

Note how in The Professor and Wuthering Heights the male lover is unable to devote himself to the reading lesson because of the distraction of the heroine's interesting physiognomy. In this connection we may glance at the following little parallel of the hen-killing figure, with which, like the foregoing, I do not deal in the course of The Key to the BrontË Works. Again we perceive Charlotte BrontË's Method I.:—

Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre were of course M. HÉger and Miss BrontË. It is indeed important and interesting to find at the old farmstead of Wuthering Heights scenes reminiscent of the intimately pedagogic relations that existed between Charlotte BrontË and M. HÉger of the school at Brussels.

Discovering Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are practically as the same book, I have disclosed their relationship in parallel columns—the most satisfactory and conclusive evidence in the world. Herewith we see both volumes agree in scenes and chapters virtually word for word, and from beginning to end. Both works we now find are one in origin, each containing not less than four identical characters portrayed by Charlotte BrontË from her own life, she herself being the original of the heroine in each book, and her friend M. HÉger in the main the original of the hero thereof. Charlotte BrontË's brother, Branwell BrontË, in agreement with her estimate of him as a wreck of selfishness, is the unhappy fool of both books; while her life-long companion, Tabitha Aykroyd, who was to her as nurse, mother, and friend, is therein the indispensable domestic servant and motherly good woman of the humble class.

I will not occupy my preface with an enumeration of the many important and interesting BrontË discoveries I have been enabled to make and present herewith in The Key to the BrontË Works. I may briefly indicate my chief sensational discoveries:—The discovery of the origin of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; the discovery that in Jane Eyre Charlotte BrontË immortalized not only herself and M. HÉger, but also her father, the Rev. Patrick BrontË, her brother, four sisters, her aunt and a cousin, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the BrontË servant or housekeeper; the discovery first revealing the history of Charlotte BrontË's life at Brussels and friendship with M. HÉger, the original of her chief heroes; and the discovery of the most sensational fact that Charlotte BrontË and not Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and was herself the original of the heroine and M. HÉger that of the hero, as I have mentioned.

My warm thanks are due to Mr. Harold Hodge, who commissioned me to write my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" for The Saturday Review;[3] and to Mr. W. L. Courtney, M.A., LL.D., the editor of The Fortnightly Review, who commissioned me to write my article "The Lifting of the BrontË Veil: A New Study of the BrontË Family."[4] Mr. Courtney's words of encouragement—those of a true gentleman and an eminent literary scholar and author—have made bright to me the accomplishment of this work.

I thank Lady Ritchie—the gifted author-daughter of Thackeray the writer of Vanity Fair to whom Charlotte BrontË in her second edition dedicated Jane Eyre—for her kind permission to use in The Key to the BrontË Works what her ladyship had written me privately in regard to her sitting at dinner beside Charlotte BrontË on June 12th, 1850, with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. George Smith the publisher, when Miss BrontË was wearing a light green dress, an incident that has relation to the green dress in the interesting HÉger portrait of Charlotte BrontË drawn in 1850, now the property of the nation and in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

I desire to express my gratitude to Miss Catherine Galbraith Welch, who introduced an outline of my BrontË discoveries to the readers of The New York Times Saturday Review of Books. I thank The Spectator, The Outlook, and other organs for their open acknowledgment of the fact that I have made a discovery at last throwing light upon Charlotte BrontË's Brussels experiences and her relations with the HÉgers at Brussels. And I wish also to thank the anonymous and scholarly writer who penned the long and careful article in The Dundee Advertiser under the heading "The Original of Jane Eyre," containing an encouraging appreciation of the importance of my discovery I dealt with in my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" in The Saturday Review.

I would like to give a pressure of the hand to my subscribers for the first edition of The Key to the BrontË Works. Your kind letters to me and your active interest in The Key to the BrontË Works will ever dwell among my pleasant memories. One I grieve will never see on earth these pages—the late Most Honourable Marquis of Ripon, K.G., who numbered with my earliest subscribers.

The readers of The Key to the BrontË Works will love Charlotte BrontË more and know her better than ever they have loved or known her in the past. They will see her books are rich with new-found treasures, and will recognize her to be a world's writer—a character of signal eminence, one of the most illustrious of women.

Truth will out, and facts have their appointed day of revelation; thus I cannot help it that more than sixty years of writing on the BrontËs is placed out of date by my discoveries.

JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.

THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS.