[1] Clement Shorter in Charlotte BrontË and her Sisters, p. 236; 1905.

[2] Clara H. Whitmore, A.M., in Woman's Work in English Fiction; 1910.

[3] The Saturday Review, September 6, 1902. A correspondence followed.

[4] The Fortnightly Review, March 1907.

[5] The BrontËs in Ireland, by Dr. William Wright, 1893, and The BrontË Homeland, by J. Ramsden, 1897, though they conflict, deal interestingly with Patrick Brunty's, or BrontË's, relations. "Patrick ... after being a linen weaver secured the post of teacher in the Glascar School, Ballynaskeagh, then that of teacher at Drumballyroney." Eventually he got a scholarship and entered St. John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated and took Holy Orders. His father was a Hugh Brunty, who married a Roman Catholic, Alice McClory, or M'Clory. She is said to have become a Protestant, as was her husband. Of this marriage there were ten children, the eldest being Charlotte BrontË's father, who early took to "larnin'," to quote the Irish hearsay. The BrontËs in Ireland has been challenged as presenting many statements impossible of verification. The assertion that an Irish Brunty foundling story suggested the foundling of Wuthering Heights raised a harsh and voluminous controversy. The Rev. Angus Mackay, in his little brochure The BrontËs—Fact and Fiction, 1897, controverted Dr. Wright, as did others elsewhere. The matter is summed up succinctly by Mr. Horsfall Turner, the Yorkshire genealogist, in The Rev. Patrick BrontË's Collected Works, 1898, where, speaking of the Irish BrontËs and the foundling story, he says:—"The only one who could transmit this story was Hugh Brunty, and not one of his descendants ever heard of it before Dr. Wright's book was issued, not even the vaguest tradition."

[6] The "wild, weird writings" of her childhood, which awed homely Mrs. Gaskell, were merely badly, or I may say, childishly, assimilated fragments from English adaptations found in Dryden, Rowe, etc., of Lucan (Pharsalia, lib. 1, 73), and of other ancient writers.

[7] Her correspondence is given in Sir Wemyss Reid's Monograph on Charlotte BrontË, in Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte BrontË, Haworth Edition, and in Mr. Clement Shorter's The BrontËs: Life and Letters, 1908.

[8] Charlotte BrontË and Her Circle, by Clement Shorter.

[9] Charlotte BrontË, upon the other hand, was a most fluent writer of prose. She sent Wordsworth a story in 1840, and spoke of her facility in writing novels. (Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte BrontË, pages 189-190, Haworth Edition.) It is said Emily corrected misprints, etc., in her printed volume of Wuthering Heights; but whether or not she did this at Charlotte BrontË's instigation is of little interest and no importance in view of the literal evidence in The Key to the BrontË Works. It may be Emily turned Charlotte's amanuensis; and it would not be difficult to show Anne BrontË also had been Charlotte's understudy. See my remarks on Wildfell Hall in Appendix.

[10] See my remarks, page 39.

[11] When King Charles II. was crowned, Montagu carried the sceptre. A historian states that the Admiral—who, I may say, had been a great friend of Richard Cromwell—perished in the sea-fight with De Ruyter, because he would not leave his ship by a piece of obstinate courage, provoked by a reflection that he took care more of himself than of the king's honour.

[12] For Basil Montagu see Dictionary of National Biography.

[13] On the other side of the same page Montagu concluded the narration of his "A Night's Repose," with which I deal later.

[14] Clement Shorter's Charlotte BrontË and Her Sisters, p. 164.

[15] See my observations on the name of Lucy Snowe.

[16] The name of "Helen Burns," that saintly sister of Charlotte BrontË, may have been suggested by the St. Helen's Well which Montagu states was near Miss Currer's home, Eshton Hall.

[17] The BrontË Country, by Dr. Erskine Stuart.

[18] A recognizable idiosyncrasy of Charlotte BrontË's genius is the vivid minuteness with which she paints and records apparently unimportant details and happenings connected with her early childhood. (See footnote on page 41.)

[19] See footnote page 47.

[20] Emily BrontË, Miss Mary Robinson; 1883.

[21] Angus Mackay, in The BrontËs: Fact and Fiction (1897), identifies Miss BrontË with Caroline Helstone. Charlotte BrontË's mother was a native of Penzance, near Helston.

[22] Catherine's diary was written on the margin of a printed sermon by the Rev. Jabes Branderham. Lockwood's "dream" in the connection was evidently a travesty on a sermon of the famous Rev. Jabes Bunting, a Wesleyan Methodist, and the zealousness of his hearers, concerning which preacher stories were possibly gathered by Charlotte BrontË from old Tabitha, who doubtless did occasional service as the old dialect-speaking Joseph. The Rev. Jabes Bunting was on the Halifax Circuit in the eighteen-twenties, and his sermons were printed in pamphlet form. Note the extract I have given from Villette on Lucy Snowe's having read as a child certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts.

[23] "Lee" may have been suggested by the name of the heroine of "Puir Mary Lee," a Scottish ballad, which I find influenced Charlotte BrontË greatly when she began to write Wuthering Heights.

[24] Called Nelly or Ellen Dean, perhaps because of Charlotte BrontË's affection for her friend Nelly or Ellen Nussey.

[25] Of course Tabitha Aykroyd was twenty years younger when Charlotte was a child. Thus the early references to the more active Ellen Dean and Bessie in the main imply Tabby in the eighteen-twenties; those to her as the sedate and glum Mrs. Dean and Hannah, as Tabby in the eighteen-forties. We see Tabby quite in the caricature of Joseph in Charlotte's half-humorous references to her in the diary-like descriptions of the BrontË kitchen fireside life of her childhood in 1829, etc.—of which the rainy day incident in the childhood of little Catherine and Jane is so reminiscent—quoted by Mrs. Gaskell in the BrontË Life:—

"June the 21st, 1829.

"One night, about the time when the cold sleet of November [is] succeeded by the snowstorms and the high, piercing night winds of winter, we were all sitting round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, 'I don't know what to do.' This was echoed by Emily and Anne.

"Tabby: 'Wha ya may go t' bed.'

"Charlotte: 'Why are you so glum to-night, Tabby?'"

As time progressed Charlotte BrontË viewed more sentimentally the associations of her early childhood. Whenever Tabby was "Joseph" of Wuthering Heights Charlotte humorously caricatured her.

[26] See footnote on page 37.

[27] A remarkably recognizable idiosyncrasy of this child-phantom of Charlotte BrontË's brain is the part the little hands of the child play. In Charlotte BrontË's child-phantom of Wuthering Heights, Chapter III., the hand of the child takes a principal part, as in her above two versions.

[28] See note on "the hand" of Charlotte BrontË's child-phantom, page 53.

[29] See the chapters on "The Recoil" for the origin of the title of Wuthering Heights, and of the name Lucy Snowe; also my remarks on Charlotte BrontË's poem "Apostasy."

[30] "The breeze was sweet with scent of heath and rush, ... the hills shut us quite in; for the glen towards its head wound to their very core."—Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV.

[31] I have known for many years the wife and children of this Robert Airton. His father was, I believe, parish clerk for Coniston. Mrs. Airton once told me that when she first met her husband he was playing a violin in the entrance of a cave, under a crag in Malhamdale.

[32] It will be observed that in Chapter XXIII. of The Professor Charlotte BrontË practically calls Frances the heroine, "Jane." Of course she is the elf Janet (see Chapter XXV. of The Professor), and this sprite was also Jane Eyre—Charlotte BrontË herself. Read the verses in Chapter XXIII. in the light of my writing on "EugÈne Sue and Charlotte BrontË's Brussels Life" and "The Recoil."

[33] Mr. Thomas J. Wise has published and edited a valuable edition of this story, 1896.

[34] "I like Charles the First," says Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Chapter VI.; "I respect him—I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!" Montagu of course would know that his own ancestor brought over Charles the Second on the Restoration. Hence his warmth. We now understand the origin of the detached fragment in Jane Eyre.

[35] It is a remarkable coincidence that Malham was the background of my first novel, a work of the substantial number of 160,000 words, which I wrote in my teens. It was published serially in The Sheffield Independent by Mr. Joseph Cooke, beginning in May 1896 and running till September, under the title of Kalderworth, a name I had compounded from the Yorkshire river Calder. Afterwards the serial rights were also purchased by Sir Edward Russell and Mr. A. G. Jeans, of The Liverpool Post, wherein the story ran serially as Lawyer Vavasor's Secret. I did not choose Malham by reason of its being, as it is, the place from which our family of Malham, or Malam, sprung: I had cycled over to the remote village with my father. I was unaware that October 15 was an especial day at Malham, nevertheless I began my story—Kalderworth:—
"On the evening of the 15th of October, in the latter end of the Eighteen Hundred and Eighties, as the sun sank greyly behind the distant skyline of those wild hills that stretch from Malham and away into the North of Yorkshire, a solitary horseman pushed his way over a hard moorland road to a little deserted hamlet, where only one soul lived, and that a hag whose fame had spread as a dabbler in the black art and the mischievous doctrines."
I did not know of Montagu's book at the time; and of all the BrontË novels I had only read Jane Eyre. I remember once reflecting—while Kalderworth was being published—that Charlotte BrontË must have called her character Jane Eyre after the river Aire, just as I had called my loosely composite village up in Malhamdale Kalderworth, from the river Calder; and I thought Currer Bell, in her choice of the name "Jane Eyre," had been actuated poetically by the fact of the adjacency of the Yorkshire river Aire, or Ayre, and had changed the "A" in Aire, just as I the "C" in Calder. Nor was it till years later that I knew Charlotte BrontË had written in Shirley, Chapter XIX., of "Calder or Aire thundering in flood."

[36] That Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights means "the village of sheep" was admitted years ago. The etymology is very obvious. We now have the circumstances in which Charlotte BrontË chose the name.

[37] See my footnote, page 58.

[38] Thus she put her cousin Eliza Branwell under the same roof as herself and Branwell BrontË in Jane Eyre.

[39] The Poems prepared for publication in the autumn of 1845 bear evidence of the influence of Montagu's work. It was at this time Montagu's work provided Charlotte BrontË's nom de guerre of Currer Bell. See my foot-note on Frances of The Professor as the Fairy Jane, page 63.

[40] A copy of this will is printed in The BrontËs: Life and Letters.

[41] Mr. Augustine Birrell in his Life of Charlotte BrontË (1887), gives a very interesting insight into a love episode of Mr. BrontË, during his first curacy, at Wethersfield, near Braintree, Essex. Mr. BrontË found a home with a Miss Mildred Davy, with whose niece, a "comely damsel of eighteen—a Miss Mary Mildred Davy Burder—with brown curls and blue eyes" he fell in love. A plotting guardian uncle, however, removed Miss Burder and wrongly intercepted all Mr. BrontË's letters. Subsequently Mr. BrontË married Miss Maria Branwell, of Penzance, visiting in Yorkshire, whom he married at St. Oswald's Church, Guiseley, near Leeds. After the death of his wife, Mr. BrontË offered to marry Miss Burder, but was refused. She became the wife of the Rev. Peter Sibree, of Wethersfield. Mr. W. W. Yates' book, The Father of the BrontËs, 1897, shows us Mr. BrontË as a curate at Dewsbury. Mr. Yates, who is the originator of the BrontË Society and Museum, rightly associated Mr. BrontË with Mr. Helstone of Shirley, supporting his contention by evidence.

[42] For story and other purposes Miss BrontË makes St. John Rivers ask Jane's hand in marriage; and of course as the original of Moor House has been supposed to be at Hathersage in Derbyshire, and it was there the Rev. Henry Nussey lived—Miss Nussey's brother—who had offered to marry Charlotte BrontË, Mrs. Gaskell's BrontË's Life and a following (including even a recent catalogue of the BrontË Museum, wherein reference is made to Mr. Nussey's portrait!) have given it forth that Mr. Nussey was the original of St. John Rivers—notwithstanding that Mr. Nussey was a married man when Charlotte was visiting at Hathersage. That Mr. Nussey and St. John Rivers are wholly dissimilar is contended at length in Charlotte BrontË and Her Sisters, pp. 166-170.

[43] The BrontËs: Life and Letters.

[44] In the love relations of Shirley Keeldar, however, we must expect to find phases of circumstances associated with Charlotte BrontË herself. Thus Shirley Keeldar is at times Currer Bell.

[45] Mr. Rochester's remarks in Jane Eyre, Chapter XII., on Jane's drawings would seem to show that though M. HÉger, the original of this character, was interested in Charlotte BrontË's gift as an artist (and we know she sent M. HÉger a drawing of hers as late as August 1845), he spoke of them in disparagement—a fact that alone argues he was her superior in art, and understood drawing. Indeed, after seeing the various water-colour and other drawings of Charlotte BrontË, some thirty of which, including "a pencil drawing of Louis Philippe of France, drawn by C. BrontË during her stay in Brussels," are numbered with the BrontË relics, I may say we can take it as really the expression of M. HÉger concerning her sketches when Mr. Rochester observes of Jane's efforts in drawing:—"You have secured the shadow of your thought, but no more probably. You had not enough of the artist's skill and science to give it being," for this is the truth concerning Charlotte BrontË's efforts of the kind. Nevertheless, I find evidence of a Brussels tradition in the eighteen-fifties that she was clever as a painter, M. Sue giving ability to his Miss Mary in this direction. It is more emphasized in his feuilleton than volume portrayal of this "Institutrice," both of which works we shall see presented phases of Miss BrontË as she was known. Hence we read, "Eh bien! monsieur, trouvez-vous qu'elle sait un peu dessiner, MA Miss Mary?" The italics, etc., are M. Sue's.

[46] Charlotte BrontË and Her Sisters, page 181.

[47] The James Taylor in the firm of her publishers, who corresponded with Miss BrontË, was not related to this Hunsworth family.

[48] See Matthew Yorke, Hiram Yorke's son, a character who has several traits in common with Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights.—Shirley, Chap. IX.

[49] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte BrontË, Haworth edition, p. 230.

[50] Note that in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre it is assumed this character made silent reference to "the Deuce"; though he never uttered the name, his words seemed to "express" the sentiment.

[51] The BrontËs: Life and Letters, p. 340, vol. i.

[52] The Moores of Shirley were mainly drawn from M. HÉger, and though a Mr. Cartwright, supposed to have had foreign blood in his veins, is conjectured to have contributed to their creation because his mill was attacked with rioters, I find that the Yorkshire, or rather, "Taylor" element, as conceived by Charlotte BrontË, also entered into their composition.

[53] It is sad indeed to find Charlotte BrontË confessed, shortly before her marriage to the Rev Mr. Nicholls, that there was no such sympathy between herself and her prospective husband. See letters of Miss Catherine Winkworth in Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (1908). Miss Winkworth and Miss BrontË discussed the matter personally. Miss Catherine Winkworth wrote of Mr. Nicholls and Charlotte BrontË:—"I am sure she will be really good to him. But I guess the true love was Paul Emanuel [of Villette] after all ... but I don't know, and don't think that Lily [Mrs. Gaskell] knows." I should say that Mrs. Ratcliffe of Haworth—Tabitha Brown: her sister, Martha Brown, was one of the BrontË servants—at whose house Tabitha Aykroyd breathed her last, stated to me on February 21st, 1907, that as to Charlotte BrontË's "wedded life, they lived happily together." Often do we discover references to the elective affinities in regard to M. HÉger and Charlotte BrontË in Currer Bell's works. Thus we did not need that Rochester should say in the last chapter but one of Jane Eyre:—"I am not better than the old lightning-struck chestnut," for we had understood by the touching apostrophe in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXV., that he and Jane were implied. The words were:—"The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; ... they might be said to form one tree—a ruin, but an entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said, as if the monster splinters were living things; ... 'the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but ... each of you has a comrade to sympathize with.'" And Rochester tells Jane:—"You are my sympathy—my better self; ... a fervent ... passion ... wraps; my existence about you—and kindling in ... powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." M. HÉger as M. Paul in Villette strikes the same note we hear in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre:—"We are alike—there is affinity between us.... Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to entangle."

[54] See Charlotte BrontË's poems "Regret" and "Apostasy."

[55] I discovered these most remarkable parallelisms by my knowledge and application of Charlotte BrontË's Method I., a fact that finally declares her the author of both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

[56] Mr. G. W. MacArthur Reynolds, the editor of The London Journal issued from The Weekly Times Office, which ran M. Sue's feuilleton, was well-known in French literary circles in the eighteen-forties. He founded in Paris The London and Paris Courier, and was likely enough a friend of M. Sue. It may be, indeed, there was some sort of understanding between him and EugÈne Sue to set before the world an interpretation of Jane Eyre, with the extraordinary information come privily to M. Sue. Some time after its publication, Mr. Reynolds stated that "the main incidents in 'Mary Lawson' were founded on actual realities." This we shall find. It is a remarkable fact in the circumstances that The London Journal for August 1, 1846—a year before Jane Eyre was published, printed on one page the opening instalment of M. Sue's Martin the Foundling, and Charlotte BrontË's poem "The Letter," with a footnote—"From a volume entitled Poems by Cuvier (sic), Ellis and Acton Bell; London, Aylott & Jones." The reader may perhaps recognize the original of Mr. Rochester in the person to whom the letter is being written.