worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr.
Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Bronte's sense of humour was but
feeble." It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But
as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is
almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the
foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no
necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a
little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her
life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she
chose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She was
shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour.
To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied
thus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those among
whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine
what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character
should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be
mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to
please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know
me...." She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the
prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have
for him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for
him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I
will regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that
ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent
with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented
to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended
her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little
newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she
ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and
Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She
describes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I taste
of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am
grateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me this
destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me."

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant's
Charlotte Bronte, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of
matrimon