f only you had told me about
_Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been
told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution,
could be trusted.

This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful and
incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had
been the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters.
She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all
doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of
the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There
must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the
danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But
Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace.
She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else.
I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart."

* * * * *

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in
which the Brontes lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend,
and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested
them most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte,
at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract
Miss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highly
approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it
was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than
the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with
some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that,
"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not
to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure
will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To
those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be
less eager for celebrity." A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so
far, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake," he said;
and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter,
and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever."
Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.

And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of
an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius