The heroine of her next novel, _Shirley_, was suggested by Emily Brontë. Only Shirley was not Emily. Shirley could not have conceived even the dim outlines of _Wuthering Heights_, but she had many of the strong qualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own nature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, an agreeable tutor whom Emily Brontë would have quite despised, naturally falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the school-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs. Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Brontë's gallery." Even if other admirers of Miss Brontë deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses all the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributed to her. In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there are reminders of what passed between the Brontë sisters in their own home. The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested them. Shirley evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the following words: "If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem--novel--drama, thinking it fine,--divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial--false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour." "After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes." "Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine article some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's." The greater part of the men in _Shirley_ were drawn from life, and are as true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, or Disraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect. No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. They have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their respective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knew nothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books of Dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they have been immortalised.