parallel
passages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_,
then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering
Heights_.

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, for
instance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly
Dean in _Wuthering Heights_; or the rainy day and the fireside scene,
which occur in the third chapter of _Wuthering Heights_ and the opening
chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Others again, such as the parallel between the
return of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will
not bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain their
startling character by the process of tearing words from their
sentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes,
and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr.
Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Bronte book, is not a living
body; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes and
tumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to show
that, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, and
that was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallel
passages depends on the identification of the characters in the Bronte
works, not only with their assumed originals, but with each other. For
Mr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Heger, a model already
remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M.
Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore,
but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw;
because (parallel passage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw
were teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were
Charlotte and M. Heger.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him by
his subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I,
interchange of the sex; Method II, alteration of the age of her
characters. With this licence almost any character may be any other.
Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr.
Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck a
knife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says to
Jane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel passage!).
Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathclif