In addition to the chief novelists,--Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment. Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_, Emily Brontë's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been classed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her sister Emily. Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.