stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and
worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in
humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to
be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very
well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give
their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the
peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will
infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if
Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I
be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where
there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no
world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me
still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had
also a hope and a motive."

Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not have
been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly
dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal
carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they
interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman
given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time
for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing and
her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of
the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them.
Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a
habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character.

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism,
which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr.
Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was but