protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own
life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte
Brontë's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about
this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers.
There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great
freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come,
how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill
came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive
than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went
away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so
far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen
little Joe Taylors before all was over."

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the
gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and
identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not
Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to
a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte
writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful),
"there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run
after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual,
had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming
joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common
sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less.
He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a
letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been
the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you
please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my