judge a work of fiction, if it proceeded from a feminine pen; and
praise mingled with pseudo-gallant allusions to her sex,
mortified her far more than actual blame.

But the secret, so jealously preserved, was oozing out at last.
The publication of "Shirley" seemed to fix the conviction that
the writer was an inhabitant of the district where the story was
laid. And a clever Haworth man, who had somewhat risen in the
world, and gone to settle in Liverpool, read the novel, and was
struck with some of the names of places mentioned, and knew the
dialect in which parts of it were written. He became convinced
that it was the production of some one in Haworth. But he could
not imagine who in that village could have written such a work
except Miss Bronte. Proud of his conjecture, he divulged the
suspicion (which was almost certainty) in the columns of a
Liverpool paper; thus the heart of the mystery came slowly
creeping out; and a visit to London, which Miss Bronte paid
towards the end of the year 1849, made it distinctly known. She
had been all along on most happy terms with her publishers; and
their kindness had beguiled some of those weary, solitary hours
which had so often occurred of late, by sending for her perusal
boxes of books more suited to her tastes than any she could
procure from the circulating library at Keighley. She often
writes such sentences as the following, in her letters to
Cornhill:--

"I was indeed very much interested in the books you sent
'Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe,' 'Guesses as Truth,'
'Friends in Council,' and the little work on English social life,
pleased me particularly, and the last not least. We sometimes