There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Bronte, she was “gentle”.  But Maria lived in Charlotte’s passionate memory, and will live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre.  Of those five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious.  She was the first of the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet maternal.  Under her name on the flat tombstone a verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred:  “Be ye also ready.”

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died.  Tragedy tells at nine years old.  It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by shock after shock of terror and of anguish.

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break, tragedy was quiescent.  Day after day, year after year passed, and nothing happened.  And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy.  They had the freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created.  They found out that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis.  For a considerable number of years they were the “Islanders”.  “It was in 1827” (Charlotte, at thirteen, records the date with gravity—­it was so important) “that our plays were established:  Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July 1827; The Islanders, December 1827.  These are our three great plays that are not kept secret.”

But there were secret plays, Emily’s and Charlotte’s; and these you gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily’s and Charlotte’s genius.  They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without.  The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing.  Their fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes.  And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be.  The girls were kept hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture, and making beds.  And for play they tramped the moors with their brother; they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars, and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever written.  Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of literature.  It was from the impressions they took in those seven years that their immortality was made.

And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that school of Miss Wooler’s at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, “a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window”.  She was then sixteen.