It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death.
Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept
the fact of her celebrity.

Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's continuous celebrity,
and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part in
her correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seems
to belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the world seems full
of Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. And yet _Wuthering
Heights_ had followed _Shirley_. It had been republished with
Charlotte's introduction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more fame
for Charlotte, but none--yet--for Emily.

Two years later came _Villette_. Charlotte went up to London a second
time and saw Thackeray again. And there were more letters, the admirable
but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially
assured. They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to
Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte
Brontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see in
them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not
let her go.

Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth is part of
Emily's life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead.
London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir
John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train of
cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink into
insignificance beside it. They are all extraneous somehow, and out of
keeping. Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have done
their worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives of