The success of Jane Eyre opened wide the doors of London to the unknown author. For a time her identity was hidden, but when it was revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world. Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet Charlotte Brontë. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped, putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not overcome.
The story of Villette is the real story of Charlotte's experiences in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The original draft of this novel was called The Professor. Charlotte knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power produced Villette—one of those novels struck off at a white heat, like George Sand's Indiana or Balzac's Seraphita. The story is largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow, the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of alien natures and strange speech.
In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë revealed much genuine humor in the malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men. Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters. And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a brilliant genius.
George Eliot And Her Two Great Novels[ToC]
"Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss"—Her Early Stories Are Rich In Character Sketches, With Much Pathos and Humor.
George Eliot is a novelist in a class by herself. She never impressed me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life. In parts of Adam Bede and throughout The Mill on the Floss she seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her books—these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again, even for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in Hardy's novels of Wessex life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over their characters.