CURRENT LITERATURE.
Charlotte Brante: the Woman. By Maude Goldring. (Elkin Mathews. 2i. 6d. net.)—Once again Charlotte Bronta and her unfortunate love story—particularly the love story—are brought under the knife of the literary dissector. Except for a lack of re- straint here and there, the little book is well written ; but why did Miss Goldring choose as the title of one of her chapters the absurd heading " The Coming of Love "? Can any one conceive anything more at variance with the reserved and scholarly subject of her study ? Miss Goldring throws out the suggestion that Emily Bronte guessed her sister's love secret, and to some extent reproduced it in Wathering Heights : "We may picture her [Charlotte] either listening with hidden face while Emily read, as their custom seems to have been ; or reading the love passages alone on the moor or in the empty study, to the beat of her heart-throbs.. Surely Emily had been writing for her ! " It does not seem to occur to Miss Goldring as a more likely supposition that if Emily did guess Charlotte's love story, her sisterly devotion and natural good taste were too great to allow her to make " copy " out of it. She goes on to ask this question : " Charlotte could and did pour burning scorn upon those who peeped and pried into the secrets of her heart. What measure would she mete now to those who seek to dis- entangle the threads of the tale of the lonely indomitable heroine, which she has and has not told us herself ? " We should give a different answer from that which Miss Goldring apparently gives. For the rest, the book. ineludes a hitherto unpublished poem by Charlotte at the age of sixteen, characteristic in thought but—perhaps naturally considering her age—somewhat amateur in workmanship, and some letters from Mr. .Bront-a.
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