Quotations from letters are taken from Margaret Smith (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), unless otherwise stated. Quotations from the works of Charlotte Brontë and from Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë are from the Penguin Classics editions unless otherwise stated. Quotations from reviews of the Brontës’ works are taken from Miriam Allott (ed.), The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).