But _Jane Eyre_ is the first English novel which in sustained intensity of emotion can compare with the novels of Madame de Staël or George Sand. The style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he too partakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the book fevered and exhausted. It is one of the ironies of fate that Charlotte Brontë with her strong pro-Anglican prejudices should belong to the school of these French women. But there is the same difference between their writings that there is between the French temperament and the English. Even in the wildest moments of Jane Eyre her passion is rather like the river Wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs is like the mountain torrent that bears all down before it. Much of the passion that Charlotte Brontë describes is pure imagination. She wrote freely to her friends about herself and the people whom she knew. The three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. Her love for Mr. Nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmer than respect. We could as easily weave a romance out of Jane Austen's remark that the poet Crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make a love story out of Charlotte's relations to Monseiur Héger, who figures as the hero in three of her books. Here she is greater than the French women writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innate genius. Perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to make four novels than had Charlotte Brontë: her sisters, Monsieur and Madame Héger, the curates, and herself; a small village in Yorkshire, two boarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent in a school in Brussels. Compare this range with the material that Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray had--then judge how much of the elixir of genius was given to each. The early pages of _Jane Eyre_, the first novel which Charlotte Brontë published, describe Lowood Institution, a place modelled upon Cowan's Bridge School. The two teachers, the kind Miss Temple and the cruel Miss Scatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the Brontës attended it. Helen Burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was Maria Brontë, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as a result of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. With what calm she replies to Jane, when she would sympathise with her for an unjust punishment: "I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular."