Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/35

 fairly hard-headed young woman, first of our modern heroines, is loved with a grand passion by Rochester, who is enchained by marriage to a hopeless lunatic. Now the novelist permits Jane to fall deeply in love with Rochester, thus perilously illustrating the possibility that a truly great and two-sided passion may come into existence outside legal status. Charlotte Brontë, however, intervened twice to save the situation. She wasn't fastidious about the chastity of Rochester: chastity is a female virtue. But she was fastidious about the chastity of Jane. And so, of course, she makes Jane ignorant at first of the fact that Rochester is married; and she makes Jane tell him that it is all up, when she learns that he is married. That was the perfectly correct thing for Jane to do.

But it created a dilemma. Charlotte Brontë knew that it created a dilemma—a dilemma with unchastity for one horn and the frustration of a grand passion for the other. (It should perhaps be explained that a grand passion, in those illiberal days, was thought of as an experience that befell a girl but once in a lifetime.) Charlotte Brontë did not quite dare to treat this dilemma. She faced it for a moment. She let her readers face