Having in Wuthering Heights made so pointed a reference to the Fairy Cave in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton, and having therein associated with it the names of Airton (Hareton) and Linton, which Montagu connected with Gimmerton or Malham, Charlotte Brontë had not openly mentioned in that work the Fairy Janet referred to by Montagu, though she hinted at "the mysteries of the Fairy Cave." But I find that her "elfish" imagination induced her later, in Jane Eyre, to appropriate for herself the rôle of the Fairy Janet, the Queen of the Malhamdale or Gimmerden elves, who ruled in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton and of Wuthering Heights, the home of Catherine Earnshaw. Thus we see Charlotte Brontë primarily associated both Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, the heroine of Jane Eyre, with Malham. And discovering the impetuosity of her imaginative nature and its romantic turn, I doubt not she was impatient to begin the tale of the "fairy-born and human-bred" heroine whose surname she took from the River Aire or Ayre, which sprang, as Montagu carefully indicates, from Malham, or Gimmerton, as Charlotte Brontë would say in her Wuthering Heights. From this came the suggestion of the "Rivers" family, with which I deal later, the names employed by Charlotte Brontë being River(s), Burn(s), Aire or Eyre, Severn, Reed, and Keeldar.
Another of Montagu's personal contributions which greatly influenced Charlotte Brontë was on the leaf before the mention of John Bell, Esq., and on the same leaf as the mention of Casterton Hall, headed "A Night's Repose." This was the narration of a night's adventure, Montagu telling how he went to a lonely hostelry and found an unwillingness in the hostess to give him bed and shelter. He also discovered a mystery surrounded the hostess and a peculiar, harsh-voiced country-bred man-servant—who came to be the original of Joseph of Wuthering Heights. At night the apparition of the hostess appears at Montagu's bedside, white-faced and lighted candle in hand. It is plain the peculiar man-servant appealed very strongly to Charlotte Brontë, and thus in both her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre transcriptions of the midnight incident this characteristic is marked and recognizable: in Joseph; and in Grace Poole, by what I have termed Charlotte Brontë's Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters. In Wuthering Heights, by her same Method I., Montagu's inhospitable hostess became the inhospitable host Heathcliffe; but in each of Charlotte Brontë's versions—Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre—a central figure of the incidents she based upon Montagu's story of "A Night's Repose" was the uncouth, coarse-voiced country-bred servant.
We also shall see that Montagu's reference to lunacy being an exception to his objection against the separation of husband and wife, and the use he made of a verse in his Malham letter, likening the moon to
"A ... lady lean and pale
Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,"
were responsible for the "plot" of Jane Eyre including an insane lady who wanders out of her chamber at night and dons a vapoury veil.
And evidence of the enthusiasm with which Charlotte Brontë applied herself to Jane Eyre is the fact that she at once took from Montagu's little volume for this her second story based upon the book's suggestions, the names of
Broughton, Poole (from Pooley), Eshton, Georgiana, Lynn (from Linton), Lowood (from Low-wood), Mason, Ingram, Helen,[16] and possibly Millcote (from Weathercote).
Thus far we see Charlotte Brontë drew Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre from the same source; that in a word, Jane Eyre, was Charlotte's second attempt to utilize and amplify the suggestions in Montagu's work which had appealed to her when she began Wuthering Heights, and we see the suggestions she utilized in Jane Eyre always bear unmistakable relationship to those she had utilized in her Wuthering Heights. But the use Charlotte Brontë made of Montagu's book was not in the nature of literary theft; that volume simply afforded suggestions which she enlarged upon.
I shall presently show how I find Jane Eyre is the second attempt of Currer Bell to enlarge upon suggestions that had appealed to her when she first read Montagu. For a commencement I will refer to the early construction of her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. As simple stories they both are based upon the description Montagu gives of an isolated hostelry with an inhospitable hostess, a midnight apparition, and an air of mystery that surrounds the hostess and a peculiar, uncouth servant, to whom I have already alluded. The stage properties of this narrative, the characters, and the "action" or plot, I will give side by side, as they appear severally, first in Montagu, next in Wuthering Heights, and finally in Jane Eyre. Herewith the reader will have excellent examples of the two chief methods I find Charlotte Brontë employed often when she drew from a character in more than one work or instance, or when she desired to veil the identity of her originals. Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., being discovered equally in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre show, as conclusively as any other evidence, that she was the author of both works. No consideration whatsoever can alter the iron fact or depreciate from its significance, that it was absolutely my discovery of Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., which revealed to me the sensational verbal and other parallels between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre I give in The Key to the Brontë Works:—
Read carefully:—