Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with her rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentment of the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine. Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, but her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria had received there flashed out years afterwards in Jane Eyre.
Charlotte Brontë was writing Jane Eyre at the same time that Emily and Anne were writing Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. As they read from their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a heroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose the conception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess, without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance as cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when she came to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights' exposure on the moor, and asking for charity. But Charlotte Brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form.
Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Brontë, as has been so often asserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, after she had once left the Hall. One suspects that he was drawn from reading, since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw a fitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of man as Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses him as "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. Yet Rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a strong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of his determination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day that he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's hero. It is well to remember, however, that the author of Jane Eyre was believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossible for a man like Rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, and not until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontës was published was Charlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men have repudiated Mr. Rochester, and so we must accept their judgment.
The heroine of her next novel, Shirley, was suggested by Emily Brontë. Only Shirley was not Emily. Shirley could not have conceived even the dim outlines of Wuthering Heights, but she had many of the strong qualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own nature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, an agreeable tutor whom Emily Brontë would have quite despised, naturally falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the school-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs. Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Brontë's gallery." Even if other admirers of Miss Brontë deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses all the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributed to her.
In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there are reminders of what passed between the Brontë sisters in their own home. The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested them. Shirley evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the following words:
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem—novel—drama, thinking it fine,—divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour."
"After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes."
"Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine article some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's."
The greater part of the men in Shirley were drawn from life, and are as true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, or Disraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect. No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. They have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their respective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knew nothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books of Dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they have been immortalised.
There is often in Charlotte Brontë's novels a separation of plot and character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. This is especially true of Shirley. At that time the attention of England was directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of life there. In Sybil Disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of the misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wrote Mary Barton, a story of Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Brontë was writing Shirley. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the introduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantly getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the book is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. When she began the funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters were with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were left alone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings, and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing upon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantly resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austen would not have admitted in a book of hers.