I will not occupy my preface with an enumeration of the many important and interesting Brontë discoveries I have been enabled to make and present herewith in The Key to the Brontë Works. I may briefly indicate my chief sensational discoveries:—The discovery of the origin of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; the discovery that in Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë immortalized not only herself and M. Héger, but also her father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, her brother, four sisters, her aunt and a cousin, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the Brontë servant or housekeeper; the discovery first revealing the history of Charlotte Brontë's life at Brussels and friendship with M. Héger, the original of her chief heroes; and the discovery of the most sensational fact that Charlotte Brontë and not Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and was herself the original of the heroine and M. Héger that of the hero, as I have mentioned.
My warm thanks are due to Mr. Harold Hodge, who commissioned me to write my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" for The Saturday Review;[3] and to Mr. W. L. Courtney, M.A., LL.D., the editor of The Fortnightly Review, who commissioned me to write my article "The Lifting of the Brontë Veil: A New Study of the Brontë Family."[4] Mr. Courtney's words of encouragement—those of a true gentleman and an eminent literary scholar and author—have made bright to me the accomplishment of this work.
I thank Lady Ritchie—the gifted author-daughter of Thackeray the writer of Vanity Fair to whom Charlotte Brontë in her second edition dedicated Jane Eyre—for her kind permission to use in The Key to the Brontë Works what her ladyship had written me privately in regard to her sitting at dinner beside Charlotte Brontë on June 12th, 1850, with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. George Smith the publisher, when Miss Brontë was wearing a light green dress, an incident that has relation to the green dress in the interesting Héger portrait of Charlotte Brontë drawn in 1850, now the property of the nation and in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I desire to express my gratitude to Miss Catherine Galbraith Welch, who introduced an outline of my Brontë discoveries to the readers of The New York Times Saturday Review of Books. I thank The Spectator, The Outlook, and other organs for their open acknowledgment of the fact that I have made a discovery at last throwing light upon Charlotte Brontë's Brussels experiences and her relations with the Hégers at Brussels. And I wish also to thank the anonymous and scholarly writer who penned the long and careful article in The Dundee Advertiser under the heading "The Original of Jane Eyre," containing an encouraging appreciation of the importance of my discovery I dealt with in my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" in The Saturday Review.
I would like to give a pressure of the hand to my subscribers for the first edition of The Key to the Brontë Works. Your kind letters to me and your active interest in The Key to the Brontë Works will ever dwell among my pleasant memories. One I grieve will never see on earth these pages—the late Most Honourable Marquis of Ripon, K.G., who numbered with my earliest subscribers.
The readers of The Key to the Brontë Works will love Charlotte Brontë more and know her better than ever they have loved or known her in the past. They will see her books are rich with new-found treasures, and will recognize her to be a world's writer—a character of signal eminence, one of the most illustrious of women.
Truth will out, and facts have their appointed day of revelation; thus I cannot help it that more than sixty years of writing on the Brontës is placed out of date by my discoveries.
JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.