In his Malham letter Montagu describes a Fairy Cave, and of course
Gimmerton has the Fairy Cave in its neighbourhood. It is placed under
the Crags, but we have no description in _Wuthering Heights_:--
MONTAGU. _Wuthering Heights._
Chapter XVIII.
Montagu has a boy-guide "adapted Says Catherine Linton to the boy
to show the prominent features Hareton:--"I want ... to hear
to strangers." He takes Montagu about the _fairishes_, as you
on to Malham, where Montagu sees call them.".... Hareton opened
the Fairy Cave. This boy-guide the mysteries of the Fairy Cave
was called Robert Airton, and he and twenty other queer places.
was aged twelve.[31] But ... I was not favoured with
a description of the interesting
objects she saw. I could gather,
however, that her guide had been
a favourite.
The name of Linton appears in Montagu in the letter next that in which
he describes the Fairy Cave. We may understand that Charlotte Brontë's
romantic imagination was entranced, as she says Catherine Linton's was,
with the mention of the Fairy Cave; and _Jane Eyre_ is testimony that
after writing _Wuthering Heights_ she turned again to consider its
possibilities of suggestion.
In fact, I find that Charlotte Brontë when she chose the name of Janet
Eyre for herself was also calling herself the Fairy Janet. And where,
then, read Charlotte Brontë of the fairy Janet Eyre? The evidence of
Montagu's work proves that when she wrote the name Eyre, she was
implying by this Derbyshire variant the name Aire or Ayre, meaning the
river Ayre. Where acquired Charlotte Brontë so intimate an acquaintance
with the history of the Fairy Janet of the Aire as to take upon herself
poetically, the rôle of that Craven elf and her name?
Mr. Harry Speight recently, in _The Craven Highlands_, told us "the
Fairy Jennet or Janet was queen of the Malhamdale elves" who frequented
the enchanted ground round the source of the Aire. But prior to
Montagu's dealing with Janet's Cave, the home of the Malhamdale fays,
the queen-elf had been referred to as Gennet. Montagu spelt the name
Jannet, and later writers having referred to him, the fairy cave now
bears the name Janet's Cave. A Malham writer prior to Montagu referred
only briefly to the Fairy Cave, and quite prosily. In his Malham letter
Montagu says:--
"Leaving a farmhouse at the entrance of the vale to the left, we [he and
his boy-guide] proceeded over two fields, then ascended about twenty
yards, suddenly turned an acute angle, and penetrating some bushes we
stood at the entrance of a deep and narrow glen, before a perpendicular
fall of water. At the foot of this cascade is
JANNET'S CAVE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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