Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with her rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentment of the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine. Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, but her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria had received there flashed out years afterwards in _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte Brontë was writing _Jane Eyre_ at the same time that Emily and Anne were writing _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_. As they read from their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a heroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose the conception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess, without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance as cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when she came to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights' exposure on the moor, and asking for charity. But Charlotte Brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form. Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Brontë, as has been so often asserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, after she had once left the Hall. One suspects that he was drawn from reading, since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw a fitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of man as Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses him as "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. Yet Rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a strong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of his determination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day that he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's hero. It is well to remember, however, that the author of _Jane Eyre_ was believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossible for a man like Rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, and not until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontës was published was Charlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men have repudiated Mr. Rochester, and so we must accept their judgment.