[Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONTE FROM THE EXQUISITELY SYMPATHETIC
CRAYON PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. NOW IN THE NATIONAL
PORTRAIT GALLERY OF LONDON]
He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic
element in English literature cannot afford to neglect _Jane Eyre_ and
_Villette_, the best of Charlotte Bronte's works. Old-fashioned these
romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly
constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpass
the opening chapters of _Jane Eyre_ for vividness and pathos, and few
things to equal the greater part of _Villette_, the tragedy of an
English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.
Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style
among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his
best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which
science utterly fails to explain.
Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors.
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