You have asked me to tell you all about Judith Crowhurst .  I will tell you something more and begin at the beginning.  You will remember that Miss Hardman said to Mrs. Pryor, Mrs. Hardman’s governess: ‘WE need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE reap the harvest of governesses.  The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be under-bred, and as such unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children’s minds and persons.  WE shall ever prefer to place those about OUR offspring, who have been born and bred with somewhat of the same refinement as OURSELVES.’  I was one of those unhappy women who, mercifully for the upper classes, inherit manners and misery in order that the children of these superior creatures may not put an ‘r’ at the end of ‘idea’ and may learn how to sit down in a chair with propriety.  My father was a clergyman holding a small country living.  He died when I was five-and-twenty, and I had to teach in order to earn my bread.  I obtained a tolerably good situation, but at the end of two years I was informed that, although a clergyman’s daughter would ‘do very well’ so long as her pupils were quite young, it was now time that they should be handed over to a lady who had been accustomed to Society.  I had become thoroughly weary of my work.  I was not enthusiastic to instruct girls for whom I did not care.  I suppose that if I had been a born teacher, I should have been as happy with the little Hardmans as I was in the nursery with my youngest sister now dead.  I should not have said to myself, as I did every morning, ‘What does it matter?’  In my leisure moments and holidays during those two years I had written a novel.  I could supply conversation and description, but it was very difficult to invent a plot, and still more difficult to invent one which of itself would speak.  I had collected a quantity of matter of all kinds before I began, and then I cast about for a frame in which to fit it.  At last I settled that my hero, if hero he could be called, should fall in love with a poor but intelligent and educated girl.  He had a fortune of about two thousand pounds a year, nearly the whole of which he lost through the defalcations of a brother, whose creditors received about five shillings in the pound.  He felt that the fair name of his family was stained, and he was consumed with a passion to repay his brother’s debts and to recover possession of the old house and land which had been sold.  He went abroad, worked hard, and met with a lady who was rich whom he really admired.  His love for his betrothed had been weakened by absence, the engagement, for some trifling reason, was broken off, and he married the heiress.  At the end of five years he returned to England, discharged every liability, and in two years more was the owner of his birthplace.  The marriage, alas! was unhappy.  There was no obtrusive fault in his wife, but he did not love her.  She could not understand his resolution to take upon himself his brother’s debts, and she thought the price he paid for the house was excessive, as indeed it was.  She was a good manager, but without imagination.  He was rejoicing, in her presence, one spring morning that he had been wakened by the clamour of the rooks with which he had been familiar ever since he was a boy, and her reply was that an estate equal in value to his own and possessing a bigger rookery had been offered him for less money by one-third than he had thrown away.  Unfortunately it is not in management or morality that we crave companionship.  It is in religion and in the deepest emotions that we thirst for it.  Gradually he became wretched, and life was almost unbearable.  She took no pleasure in the ancient place and its beautiful garden, he never asked her to admire them, and there was neither son nor daughter to inherit his pious regard.  At this point I was obliged to introduce the Deus ex machina , and the wife died.  The widower sought out his first love; she had never wavered in her affection to him; they were married, had children, and were happy.

My tale was a youthful blunder.  It was not really a tale.  I introduced, in order to provide interest, all sorts of accessories - aunts, parsons, gamekeepers, nurses, a fire and some hairbreadth escapes, but they were none of them essential and they were all manufactured.  The only parts not worthless were those which were autobiographical.

One of them I remember very well, although my MS. was burnt long ago.  I believed then that Nature is not merely beautiful, but that she can speak words which we can hear if we listen devoutly, and that if personality has any meaning she is personal,

‘The guide, the guardian of the heart and soul.’

Towards the end of an autumn afternoon I had rambled up to the pillar which was a landmark to seven counties.  It was wet during the morning, but at five o’clock the rain ceased and a long, irregular line of ragged cloud, dripping here and there, stretched itself above the opposite hills from east to west.  Underneath it was a border of pale-golden, open sky, and below was the sea.  The hills hid it, but I knew it was there.  I was hushed and reassured.  When I got home I transferred my emotion to my deserted heroine, and tears blotted the paper.  But it was a mere episode, without connection and, in fact, an obstruction.

I sent my manuscript to a publisher and need hardly say that it was returned as unsuitable.  I tried two others, but with no success.  The third enclosed a copy of his reader’s opinion.  Here it is:-

‘ . . . is obviously a first attempt.  It evinces some power in passages, but the characters lack distinction and are limited by ordinary conventional rules.  I cannot recommend it to you for its own sake, and there is no prospect in it of anything better.  The author might be capable of short stories for a religious magazine.  It is singular that Miss C.’s Mariana , which you also sent me, should be on somewhat the same lines, but Mariana, his first love, is seduced by the man who forsakes her and, in the end, marries her as his second wife.  During his first marriage his intimacy with Mariana continues and Miss C. thereby has an opportunity, which she used with much power, for realistic scenes, that I believe will prove attractive.  I had no hesitation therefore in advising you to purchase Mariana , although the plot is crude.’  I could not take the publisher’s hint.  I put my papers back into my box and obtained another situation.  In about a twelvemonth, notwithstanding my disappointment, I was unable to restrain myself from trying again.  I fancied that I might be able to project myself into actual history and appropriate it.  I had been much attracted to Mary Tudor, and I had studied everything about her on which I could lay my hands.  I did not love her, but I pitied her profoundly, and the Holbein portrait of her seemed to me to indicate a terrible and pathetic secret.  I cannot, however, give a complete explanation of her fascination for me.  It is impossible to account for the resistless magnetism with which one human being draws another.  The elements are too various and are compounded with too much subtlety.  Bitter Roman Catholic as Mary was, I wished I could have been one of the ladies of her court, that I might have offered my heart to her and might have wept with her in her sorrow.  But my intense feeling for a picture of the Queen was no qualification to paint the original, and although I strove to keep close to facts she insensibly became myself.  I was altogether stopped when I happened to meet with Aubrey de Vere’s Mary Tudor and Tennyson’s Queen Mary.

Soon afterwards I read Jane Eyre again, and was more than ever astonished at it.  It is not to be classed; it is written not by a limited human personality but by Nature herself.  The love in it is too great for creatures who are ‘even as the generations of leaves’; the existence of two mortals does not account for it.  There is an irresistible sweep in it like that of the Atlantic Ocean in a winter’s storm hurling itself over the western rocks of Scilly.  I do not wonder that people were afraid of the book and that it was cursed.  The orthodox daughter of a country parson broke conventional withes as if they were cobwebs. Jane Eyre is not gross in a single word, but its freedom is more complete than that of a licentious modern novel.  Do you recollect St. John Rivers says to Jane: ‘Try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with which you throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures.  Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite, transient objects.  Do you hear, Jane?’

She replies - ‘Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek.  I feel I have adequate cause to be happy, and I will be happy.  Good-bye!’

Therein speaks the worshipper of the Sun.  Do you also recollect that voice in the night from Rochester?  She breaks from St. John, goes up to her bedroom and prays.  ‘In my way - a different way to St. John’s, but effective in its own fashion.  I seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet.  I rose from the thanksgiving - took a resolve - and lay down, unscared, enlightened - eager but for the daylight.’  The Mighty Spirit, who was Jane Eyre’s God, had directed her not to go to India as St. John’s bride to save souls from damnation by conversion to Jehovah, but to set off that very day to Rochester at Thornfield Hall.

Consider also how inseparably the important incidents in Jane Eyre are linked with one another and with character.  Jane refused Rochester at first and St. John finally.  She could not possibly do otherwise.  But I must stop.  You did not ask for an essay on Charlotte Bronte.  Suffice it to say that when I had finished Jane Eyre I said to myself that I would not write any more.  Nor did I ever attempt fiction again. Judith Crowhurst is a plain, true story, altered a little in order to prevent recognition.  I knew her well.  There is no suffering in any stage tragedy equal to that of the unmarried woman who is well brought up, with natural gifts above those of women generally, living on a small income, past middle-age, and unable to work.  It is not the suffering which is acute torture ending in death, but worse, the black, moveless gloom of the second floor in Hackney or Islington.  Almost certainly she has but few friends, and those she has will be occupied with household or wage-earning duties.  She is afraid of taking up their time; she never calls without an excuse.  What is she to do?  She cannot read all day, and, if she could, what is the use of reading?  Poets and philosophers do not touch her case; descriptions of moonlit seas, mountains, moors, and waterfalls darken by contrast the view of the tiles and chimneys from her own window.  Ideas do not animate or interest her, for she never has a chance of expressing them and, lacking expression, they are indistinct.  Her eyes wander down page after page of her book, but she is only half-conscious.  Religion, such as it is now, gives no help.  It is based on the necessity of forgiveness for some wrong done and on the notion of future salvation.  She needs no forgiveness unless she takes upon herself a burden of artificial guilt.  She rather feels she has to forgive - whom or what she does not know.  The heaven of the churches and chapels is remote, unprovable, and cannot affect her in the smallest degree.  There is no religion for her and such as she, excepting that Catholic Faith of one article only - The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him .  As I have said, I knew Judith Crowhurst well, and after she was dead I wrote her biography, because I believed there are thousands like her in London alone.  I hoped that here and there I might excite sympathy with them.  We sympathise when we sit in a theatre overpowered by stage agony, but a truer sympathy is that which may require some effort, pity for common, dull, and deadly trouble that does not break out in shrieks and is not provided with metre and scenery.

You were kind enough to get Judith Crowhurst published for me, and it has had what is called a ‘success,’ but I doubt if it will do any good.  People devour books but, when they have finished one, they never ask themselves what is to be done.  It is immediately followed by another on a different subject, and reading becomes nothing but a pastime or a narcotic. Judith may be admired, but it is by those who will not undergo the fatigue of a penny journey in an omnibus to see their own Judith, perhaps nearly related to them, and will excuse themselves because she is not entertaining.

I was asked the other day if I was not proud of some of the reviews.  Good God!  I would rather have been Alice Ayres, {148} and have died as she died, than have been famous as the author of the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost , or Hamlet .  She is now forgotten and sleeps in an obscure grave in some London cemetery.  No! there will be nothing more.  I have said all I had to say.