As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on
them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were
certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad
little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face
that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs.
Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might
have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly
have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their
cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited
to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about
like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded
from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the
paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear
lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt,
considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly
incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had
offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order
in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine
day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that
incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift.
She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would
believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one
talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening
in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white,
billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the
world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of
labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me
with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps