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    414 NOTICES OF BOOKS.

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  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

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    ^».Reprints Hall. . B Mrs Y Ac . Graskel...

    while the others were accepted . It lias certainly much , more artistic merit of that in terrible it than wild " Agnes streng Grey th of : " thoug and on ht the and other utterance hand rampant it has none in

    vention " "Wuthering alities Hei of a ghts publi , " sher which . , mi Perh g _^ ht ap well s tlie fri reason ghten Until Is the to be tender Crimsworth found con in - tlie flat uninteresting character of the opening .

    gets settled in the pensionnat abroad there is little to tempt one to farther perusalThen the story becomes interesting . _Zoraide Reuter and

    . Frances Henri are admirably drawn : there is nothing to come near them in the ordinary range of fiction . Pelet is good , and the

    sketches of the Belgian girls are _unsiirpassible . Hunsden is throughout unsatisfactory : he is manifestly drawn from the life line by

    line , and yet for the reader he never has any existence : he is ( to the reader ) a lay-fiput into a rigid attitude , without even a

    covering mantle on gure which the fancy can be exercised . It seems to us that this is attributable to the false position of tlie writer . Miss

    Bronte paints Hunsden from the life as he appeared to her , a womannot as lie would have appeared to Crimsworth , a man ; and

    yet it , is Crimsworth and not Miss Bronte who tells the reader about him . Here the realism , of the described and the falsism of

    the describer do not harmonise . In the " Professor , " the life at the Brussels _peizsionnat is depicted icture in

    with . much , general accuracy . The picture here and the p Villette are the same , only seen from different points of view . This

    Brussels life seems to have exercised a great effect upon Charlotte . Oyer Emilas we have said beforeit had no appreciable influence ;

    in her the y , home-love was so strong , ly rooted that no change of climate could permanently affect it ; it remained shut up and

    selfenclosed under the -wintry aspect of foreign skies , opening again untouched and unchanged at the spring time of return home . "With

    Charlotte it was different . She remained abroad longer than Emily , and thus perhaps became more acclimatised ; she had less

    self-confidence than Emily , and here , under the judicious tutelage of M . Hegeradvanced greatly in that power of self-measurement and

    selfestimation , in which she was deficient ; she here for the first time ht a limpse of that world which she was so desirous to see ;

    there caugg have been other circumstancesbutat all eventsthis Brussels may sojourn was a crisis which acted perceptibl , , y on her after , -

    life . Two of her books she has founded upon it , and its effects are noticeable in all . In the year 1845 she writes , " There -was a

    time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me ; it is not so now . I feel as if we were all buried here . I long to travel ; to

    work ; to live a life of action . _" In the same year a friend of hers tells her that " she ought not to stay at home ; that to spend the

    next five years at home , in solitude and -weals : health , would ruin her ; that she would never recover it . Such a dark shadow came over her

    face when I said , ' Think of what you'll be _& ve years hence ! ' that

    I stopped , and said , ' Don't cry , Charlotte . ' It is very evident that

    414 Notices Of Books.

    414 NOTICES OF BOOKS .

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Feb. 1, 1860, page 414, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01021860/page/54/