Publisher's Synopsis
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a short essay on "The Three Brontes" I agreed with some misgiving. Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with another Bronte book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never meant to write so long a book. It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the original essay. The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations. None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or Charlotte Bronte."
