No welcome awaited him at home, because he had failed in his mission. He gave to Mr. McKee a detailed account of his adventures in England, but I do not think anyone else ever heard from him a single word regarding the sad home at Haworth. But as long as he lived he regretted his helplessness to avenge the slight put upon his niece, and seemed to look on the miscarriage of his plans as the great failure of his life.
Since the foregoing article was put in type Doctor Wright has written to the editor of this magazine announcing that he has discovered the author of the “Quarterly” review. He says:
“Assuming the editor’s responsibility for the incriminated interpolations, who wrote the article itself? Secrets have a bad time of it in our day, and the authorship of the article is no longer a secret. As has been generally suspected, the writer was a woman, and that woman was Miss Rigby, the daughter of a Norwich doctor, and was better known as Lady Eastlake.
“The well-kept secret has been brought to light by Doctor Robertson Nicoll in the ‘Bookman’ of September, 1892. Doctor Nicoll found the key to the mystery in a letter written on March 31, 1849, by Sara Coleridge to Edward Quillman, and published in the ‘Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge.’ The following is the passage referred to:
“‘Miss Rigby’s article on “Vanity Fair” was brilliant, as all her productions are. But I could not agree to the concluding remark about governesses. How could it benefit that uneasy class to reduce the number of their employers, which, if high salaries were considered in all cases indispensable, must necessarily be the result of such a state of opinion?’
“The ‘Quarterly’ article on ‘Vanity Fair’ dealt also with ‘Jane Eyre,’ and with the ‘Report of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution for 1847,’ and it is without doubt the article referred to by Sara Coleridge.
“On this matter Sara Coleridge was not likely to be under any mistake. Miss Rigby was her intimate friend, and not likely to conceal from her so important a literary event as the production of a ‘Quarterly’ review.
“I am also informed that Mr. George Smith, the publisher of ‘Jane Eyre,’ declares without hesitation or doubt that he had always known that Lady Eastlake was the author of the ‘Quarterly’ article, and that he had declined to meet her at dinner on account of it.
“The fact that the brilliant Miss Rigby was the writer of the review greatly strengthens my interpolation theory. To me it seems beyond the range of things probable, that the pharisaic part of the article could have come from the same source as ‘Livonian Tales’ and the ‘Letters from the Shores of the Baltic.’
“The article is therefore of a composite character. It was written by Miss Rigby the year before her marriage with Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and heavily edited during the reign of Lockhart. I know it will be said that the genial Lockhart would not have added the objectionable fustian to the superior material supplied by Miss Rigby; but I must repeat that it was his duty, as a mere matter of business, and a purely editorial affair, to maintain the traditional tone of the ‘Review.’”
The Reverend David McKee of Ballynaskeagh, a very successful school teacher, who prepared hundreds of boys for college. Among them was Captain Mayne Reid, who afterwards dedicated his book, “The White Chief,” to Mr. McKee. Ballynaskeagh, was the centre of mental activity for the country round about. Its master was the friend and neighbor of the Irish Brontës. He himself wrote several books, one of which led to the beginning of a temperance movement in Ireland. The writer of this article was his pupil at the time of the publication of “Jane Eyre,” and tells whereof he knows personally, as well as some things of which he was informed by Mr. McKee.
The December number of the “Quarterly Review” of 1848 is perhaps the most famous of the entire series. Its fame rests on a mystery which has baffled literary curiosity for close on half a century. “Who wrote the review of ‘Jane Eyre’?” is a question that has been asked by every contributor to English literature since the critique appeared. But thus far the question has been asked in vain.
The descendant and namesake of the eminent projector and proprietor of “The Quarterly” does not feel at liberty to solve the mystery by revealing the writer. I admire the loyalty of John Murray to a servant whose work has attained an evil pre-eminence. It is interesting to know, in these prying and babbling times, that in the house of Murray the secret of even a supposed ruffian is safe to the third generation.