illing to remedy: such reminder, in forcing
on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an
obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and
shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and
unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the
world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents....
Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you,
dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating
to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a
desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce
modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and
consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot
you alter these things?... You would wish to be proud of your daughters,
and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an
occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the
mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and
degraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace
to you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in
health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in
old age."

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone,
not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and
Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!)
does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.

_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book.
Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than
Emily Bronte's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother,
"the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Bronte's vindication
of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once
for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you
what she is like."

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither
George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told
the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Bronte's superior
greatness that she saw.

* * * * *

You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with the
splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is
narrowe