oors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his
best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which
science utterly fails to explain.

Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side
was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged
to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a
heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had,
a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became
a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense
shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.
Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two
died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others,
starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the
school that Charlotte held up to infamy in _Jane Eyre_.

The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were
Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind
of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove
endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were
her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.
These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the
parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political
questions as the average member of Parliament.

At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these
precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father
developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his
children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children
could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at
school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and
Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made
great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work
of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of
their own. To prepare themselves in Frenc