CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE THREE BRONTËS
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a short essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving.
Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with another Brontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never meant to write so long a book.
It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the original essay.