that remembers
After such years of change and suffering."

That Charlotte had some admirers among her father's curates is well
known, and that Mr. Nichols paid court to her eight years previous to
the time of her marriage with him. That she was capable of intense and
passionate devotion there can be no doubt, but we have no hint as to
whom she had lavished it upon, in any of her letters.

She was always extremely sensitive about her personal appearance,
considering herself irredeemably ugly, and always thinking that people
must be disgusted with her looks. She purposely made her heroine in
"Jane Eyre" unattractive, as she felt it an injustice that a woman must
always be judged by her looks, and she felt that novelists were somewhat
to blame in the matter, as they always made their heroines beautiful in
person, however unattractive in mind or character. She was extremely
short,--"stunted," as she herself calls it,--never having grown any
after the days of her starvation at Cowan's Bridge. She had soft brown
hair, and good and expressive eyes, though she was so near-sighted; a
large mouth; and a broad, square, somewhat overhanging forehead. Her
voice was very sweet, and she was not at all the unattractive person she
fancied herself, though by no means beautiful. She was exquisitely neat
in her dress, and dainty about her gloves and shoes. She had a keen and
delicate touch, and could do any difficult work with her hands, which
were the smallest perhaps ever seen upon a grown woman. Her needlework
was marvellous, and she was an exquisite housekeeper, attending to the
minutest details herself. Her circle of friends and acquaintances was a
very narrow one all her life, though after the publication of "Jane
Eyre" it of course widened and improved.

Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell proved themselves warm and
enthusiastic friends to Charlotte; and Thackeray, who met her in London,
where she visited her publishers, was much pleased with her, and wrote
very kindly of her after her death. Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth
became much interested in her, and she enjoyed her visits to them in
Westmoreland very highly. The Lake country was a revelation to her,
though she was somewhat oppressed by seeing it all in company. She
writes:--

"If I could only have dropped unseen out of the carriage, and gone
away by myself in amongst those grand hills and sweet dales, I
should have drunk in the full power of this