childhood yet lay fresh upon their hearts, as it were to bear her company. Four daughters and a son remained, to cheer his heart with parental hopes, and sometimes to gladden his home with loving looks and tones of affection; but only at intervals, for he was poor, and his children might not eat the bread of idleness. The sisters all went out as governesses, and suffered many of the hardships and insults to which that useful but despised class of persons are too commonly exposed. One of them came home and died in consequence, it is said, of what she had to endure at a school in which she was a teacher. In all, there was no doubt a pre-disposition to pulmonary disease, and the shortening of their lives may be attributed to the excessive toil, hard fare, and other miseries attendant on their state of dependence at educational establishments. The elder sister, Charlotte, (Currer Bell,) was for a year and a half at one of these establishments at Brussels, and while there she describes herself as never free from the gnawing sensation, or consequent feebleness, of downright hunger.
To this deprivation of sufficient food she attributes the smallness of her stature, which was below that of most women. In her novel of "Jane Eyre," she no doubt exhibits some of her school experiences at this place of torture for mind and body. It was probably the desire to escape from such a thraldom as this which induced the girls to determine on trying their hands at authorship. "We had very early," says Charlotte, in the preface to her third and last novel—'Villette'—"cherished the dream of becoming authors. This dream, never relinquished, even when distance divided, and absorbing tasks occupied us, now, (in 1845, when the three sisters were at home together,) suddenly acquired strength and consistency: it took the character of a resolve," and led, we may add, after many obstacles were overcome, to the publication of a volume of "Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell," a title which gave no indication of the sex of the writers. This volume did not attract much attention; but, nothing daunted, the sisters set to work each upon a prose tale. Emily, "Wuthering Heights;" and Ann, "Agnes Grey." The title of Charlotte's first tale we do not learn; but it seems to have failed at the time in obtaining a publisher; and while it was going the round of the trade, its author was industriously working at her second and most successful novel, "Jane Eyre," which, when finished, was at once accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder, and achieved a decided success. "There are," says a contemporary critic, "but few instances to be found in the literary history of the time, in which an unknown writer has taken a firmer hold at once on the public mind, than the authoress of "Jane Eyre." The startling individuality of her portraits, drawn to the life, however strange and wayward that life may be, fixes them on the mind, and seems to 'dare you to forget.' Successions of scenes, rather than of story, are dashed off under a fit of inspiration, until the reader, awed as it were by the presence of this great mental power, draws breath, and confesses it must be truth; though perhaps not to be recognised among the phases of any life he may have known, or scenes he may have witnessed."
Such is the wonderful story on which the literary reputation of Miss Bronte is based. Its appearance, in the autumn of 1847, took the world completely by surprise, and the sensation which it created was deepened in intensity by the mystery of its authorship;
