There is often in Charlotte Brontë's novels a separation of plot and character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. This is especially true of _Shirley_. At that time the attention of England was directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of life there. In _Sybil_ Disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of the misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wrote _Mary Barton_, a story of Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Brontë was writing _Shirley_. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the introduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantly getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the book is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. When she began the funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters were with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were left alone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings, and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing upon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantly resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austen would not have admitted in a book of hers. Before Charlotte Brontë wrote _Jane Eyre_ or _Shirley_, she had finished _The Professor_, and offered it to different publishers, but it was rejected by all. Finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformed it into the beautiful story of _Villette_, where the school of Madame and Monseiur Héger in Brussels is made immortal. In the plot of _Villette_, as in the plot of _Jane Eyre_ and of _Shirley_, many extraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary. Like _Jane Eyre_, _Villette_ is steeped in the romantic spirit, but the hard light of reason again dispels the illusion. In the management of the supernatural Charlotte is far inferior to Emily. The explanation of the nun in _Villette_ is even childish. It is the mistake made by Mrs. Radcliffe, by nearly all writers of the age of reason. They give a ray, as it were, a whisper from the mysterious world which surrounds that which is manifest to our everyday senses. Be it the fourth dimension, or what not, we catch for a moment a message from this other world, which, even indistinct, still tells us that this visible world is not all, that there is something beyond. Then, with hard common-sense, they deny their own message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leave us only the material world in which to believe. Not so Emily Brontë. Not so Scott or Shakespeare. We may believe in Hamlet's ghost or not; we may believe or not in the White Lady of Avenel; we may believe or not that Catharine's soul hovered near Heathcliff.