had
ever known had sacrificed more to others, or done it with a fuller
consciousness of what she was sacrificing. If duty and affection bade
her act, no sense of weakness or of inclination had any power over her.
She was afraid of life, but she stood up to it; she was never crushed
or broken. Consider the circumstances under which she began to write
Jane Eyre. She had written her novel The Professor, and it was returned
to her nine several times, by publisher after publisher. Her father was
threatened with blindness. She had taken him to Manchester for an
operation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to nurse
him. The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with a polite
refusal. That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane Eyre. Later on
too, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she had begun Shirley,
and she finished it after the deaths of her sisters. She was perfectly
merciless to herself, saw no reason why she should be spared any sorrow
or suffering or ill-health, but looked upon it all as a stern but not
unjust discipline. She had one of the most passionately affectionate
natures both in friendship and home relations--"my hot tenacious
heart," she once says! But there was no touch of softness or
sentimentality about her; she never feebly condoned weaknesses; her
observation of people was minute, her judgment of them severe and even
satirical. Her letters abound in pungent humour and acute perception;
and her idea of charity was not that of mild and muddled tolerance. She
had a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, and
she could return stroke for stroke.

She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not intended
to be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically or
indifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture, ideas;
she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be loved; yet
she did not think of love in the way in which all English romancers had
treated it for over a century, as a condescending hand held out by a
superior being, for the glory of which a woman submitted to a more or
less contented servitude; but as a glowing equality of passion and
worship, in which two hearts clasped each other close, with a sacred
concurrence of soul. And thus it was that she and Robert Browning,
above all other writers of the century, put the love of man and woman
in the true light, as the supreme worth of life; not as a half-se