h, Emily and Charlotte went
to a boarding school in Brussels.

This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious,
she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French so that she
wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a
girlish love for her teacher, as passionate as it was brief, and that
her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so
unlike the only one that she had known.

The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the
well-known author of _Cranford_. It is one of the finest biographies
in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who
follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of
application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture
in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.

Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the
tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the
fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely
upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as
any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very
close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but
overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her
soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these
years.

The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three
sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The
first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book
fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were
undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not
strange that these stories lacked merit.

Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it
_The Professor_. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but
Emily's _Wuthering Heights_ and Anne's _Agnes Gray_ were published.
Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with
scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an
opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre
and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to
bring out her first book, Charlotte began _Jane Eyre_, largely
autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was p