It had always been noticed that several similar motives appeared in her novels; the love of a girl for her school master, a married man; an intense craving for affection; and pictures of sad partings. It was known that Charlotte had attended the school of M. Heger, a married man in Brussels, that she had left it and then returned, and later departed finally. There were critics who suspected that Charlotte was really in love with her teacher and that various scenes in her novels had their counterpart in reality. Among these were Sir Wemyss Reid, Augustine Birrel and Angus Mackay. But other critics scoffed at the idea. So great a Brontë student as Clement Shorter said it would be the act of treachery to pry into the writer's heart. May Sinclair, especially, repudiated with indignation the possibility that Brontë drew on actual facts for her novels; and her purposes in writing her _The Three Brontës_, was to demolish the theory that Charlotte Brontë was in love with M. Heger. But shortly after this work appeared there were published in 1913 in the London _Times_ one of the "scoops" of the age, four pathetic heart burning love letters by Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger, written without pride, pleading for a little affection. The secret was out; there could be no doubt that the scenes of unrequited love in her novels were due to her own unreciprocated love for M. Heger and that Charlotte was Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre in _Villette_ and _Jane Eyre_, respectively. Miss Sinclair wrote an article attacking the publishing of the letters which had disproved her theory. An excellent study of the influences of Charlotte's sad love affair on her work was made by Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick in her _In the Footsteps of the Brontës_. It is really a psychoanalytical study, for it traces the novelist's work to her repressions. Another study has been promised by Lucille Dooley, who made several abstracts of psychoanalytical studies of genius from essays by Freud's disciples, in the _American Journal of Psychology_. I just wish to point out a few of the influences of Brontë's love affair upon her work. Charlotte Brontë published _Jane Eyre_ in October, 1847, and wrote in 1848: "Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with.... Besides not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience." After she left Brussels on December 29, 1843, she wrote that she suffered much and that she would never forget what the parting cost her. This departure inspired the description of the flight from Thornfield (which is Brussels in _Jane Eyre_), the part of the novel which she told her biographer appealed to her most.