The lives of these girls was sad and unfortunate. They belonged to a respectable family, and throughout maintained their respectability shut in by conventionality and suffering from poverty. Jane Eyre is a girl whose mind and not her face was her fortune. The story is in reality the autobiography of the inner tempestuous life of Charlotte Bronte herself. Jane is governess in the family of an eccentric man named Rochester, who was at one time the hero of half the women of England. He loved Jane and asked her to marry him, but at the altar it is discovered that he has a wife living, whom he had looked on as dead because she was insane. So the lovers are parted to be united only in a tragedy. Wuthering Heights is a story of love and revenge within the conventionalities of English higher-class life, and extends over two generations. As a study of love and the far-reaching effects of its disappointment, it is a powerful though gloomy story, and by no means so finely artistic as Jane Eyre. Another woman’s work in a class by itself is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which to this day is found in the list of half dozen best selling books, equaling the sales of the latest current novel. It is a wonderfully humorous, pathetic, and sympathetic picture of Southern life before the war, and probably as exact as most historical fiction, though many Southerners violently resent its claim to truthfulness. CHAPTER XI. _THE SHORT STORY--POE, HAWTHORNE, MAUPASSANT._ As we have seen, the original form of modern fiction was that of the short story--the tavern tale rendered in classic language by Boccaccio in The Decameron and by the unknown author of The Arabian Nights. All the great novelists wrote more or less short stories. Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are classics. Balzac was a master of the short story, and in “A Passion in the Desert” and “La Grande Bretèche” we have two of the most powerful stories ever written. Dickens and Thackeray are also short story tellers of rare accomplishments. “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes,” and “The Cricket on the Hearth” are among Dickens’s best work; and scattered through his novels we will find such complete narratives as “The Five Sisters of York” in Nicholas Nickleby. “The Princess’s Tragedy” is a chapter in Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. But Edgar Allan Poe is the father of the modern short story, the short story as a refined work of art rather than merely a simple short narrative.