Little God-Sister

Abstract

T HE ABBE DIMNET, who, according to Andrew Lang, wrote the best of all possible BrontE biographies, admitted the possibility that the BrontE name might diminish with the years, yet live on in the minds of educated people everywhere. This gem of prophetic understatement has to reckon with a current popularity for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights one hundred years after their publication, challenged, if by anything, only by that of Debussy's Clair de Lune' Nor is insinuation into magazine digests and the motionpicture industry exactly the most direct path to oblivion. By now, everyone rests comfortably assured that the elder Mr. BrontE did not, after all, rear his children on vegetables and make them walk in the rain, and that he was proud of their academic accomplishments, which would put a modern nursery-schoolful of incipient geniuses to shame. As adults they are easily distinguishable. Pious little Anne, who, first as governess, then as invalid, patiently submitted to obscurity, and at last lay down on the parlor sofa of a seaside boardinghouse, calmly to die. Branwell, who rebelled against mediocrity by seducing the wife of the gentleman in whose house he was employed as tutor, and by courting death with delirium tremens. Dark-eyed Emily, haughty and secretive, called by Charlotte the black swan' so respectable at her breadmaking in the Parsonage kitchen, but as one gone mad with passionate joy when released against the desolate beauty of the moors. These died young, and in circumstances which have ever since defied the prying of commentators. But concerning Charlotte, who alone of them all managed to prolong the misery of her existence so far that she became not only