This seems a fitting place to state how utterly unconscious she was of what was, by some, esteemed coarse in her writings. One day, during that visit at the Briery when I first met her, the conversation turned upon the subject of women's writing fiction; and some one remarked on the fact that, in certain instances, authoresses had much outstepped the line which men felt to be proper in works of this kind. Miss Brontë said she wondered how far this was a natural consequence of allowing the imagination to work too constantly; Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth and I expressed our belief that such violations of propriety were altogether unconscious on the part of those to whom reference had been made. I remember her grave, earnest way of saying, "I trust God will take from me whatever power of invention or expression I may have, before He lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfitting to be said!"
Again, she was invariably shocked and distressed when she heard of any disapproval of "Jane Eyre" on the ground above-mentioned. Some one said to her in London, "You know, you and I, Miss Brontë, have both written naughty books!" She dwelt much on this; and, as if it weighed on her mind, took an opportunity to ask Mrs. Smith, as she would have asked a mother--if she had not been motherless from earliest childhood--whether, indeed, there was anything so wrong in "Jane Eyre."
I do not deny for myself the existence of coarseness here and there in her works, otherwise so entirely noble. I only ask those who read them to consider her life,--which has been openly laid bare before them,--and to say how it could be otherwise. She saw few men; and among these few were one or two with whom she had been acquainted since early girlhood,--who had shown her much friendliness and kindness,--through whose family she had received many pleasures,--for whose intellect she had a great respect,--but who talked before her, if not to her with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Take this in connection with her poor brother's sad life, and the out-spoken people among whom she lived,--remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be,--and then do her justice for all that she was, and all that she would have been (had God spared her), rather than censure her because circumstances forced her to touch pitch, as it were, and by it her hand was for a moment defiled. It was but skin-deep. Every change in her life was purifying her; it hardly could raise her. Again I cry, "If she had but lived!"