It is a curious fact that three of the most successful and eminent literary women in England—Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford—should have been typical old maids; not merely unmarried through stress of intervening circumstances—ill health, early disappointment, or a self-sacrificing devotion to other cares—but women whose lives were rounded and completed without that element which we are taught to believe is the main-spring and prime motor of existence. To understand how thoroughly this was the case, we have but to turn to a later and very different writer, Charlotte Brontë, who married when she was thirty-eight, and died one year afterward, and whose whole literary life was accordingly passed in spinsterhood. Yet if that very grave and respectable gentleman, the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, had never appeared upon the scene at all, it would have been impossible to call Miss Brontë a typical old maid. She had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic attitude toward the male sex; but burning in every fibre of her being, and evident in every page of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that inarticulate, distressful longing of a woman who craves love. We can easily imagine Elizabeth Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse, dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from their lovers’ grasp and growing into old maids as charming as was Miss Austen herself; but poor plain Jane Eyre, and that reticent little school-teacher, Lucy Snowe, are shaken and consumed with the passion of their own desires. Such women cannot walk from the cradle to the grave, handling their lives with delicate satisfaction and content; they must find what they need or die.