it have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things
they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of
men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to
the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the
world and link the generations each to each." (And very proper of them,
too.) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured
this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least
very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to
be expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not
one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the
larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on
Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finally
found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the
prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing in
the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw
around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in
the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of
independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had
not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have
conceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her
two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the
true. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to
that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. In
these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned,
a thorough revolutionary.

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her
victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women,