Maud and Charlotte Bronte

Monday, July 18, 1932

...In the afternoon I made my escape and in a corner of the lake among the pines read Bensons new book on Charlotte Bronte. A fascinating volume. But I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the domineering little shrew he pictures her, any more, perhaps than she was like the rather saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell's biography. I doubt if anyone knows, or knew , or ever will know the real Charlotte Bronte.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol. IV, Rubio - Waterston) pp. 187 - 188

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Thursday, March 29, 1934

These past ten days have generally been cold or stormy, filled with a lot of routine duties. I find it hard to put any heart in them. But yesternight, after enduring a chilly house all day I hied me to bed with a new book--Benson's Bronte--and forgot the world and its worries and heartbreaks for a few hours. The book is very fascinating. But he is too hard on Charlotte and his idea of Branwell's helping Emily to write Wuthering Heights is simply silly. What a fascination that strange family exercise on the world!! Every year fresh books, filled with fresh guesses about them, pour from the press. How furious they would have been had they dreamed how every action and motive of their lives would be thus raked over and held up to the world, with all sorts of absurd interpretations and suppositions.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol IV, Rubio - Waterston, p 257

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Yesterday, I hied myself out the back gate of the garden and took the few steps to the library to pick up some books on The Brontes. Yesterday was errand day but I never made it very far as I spent most of the afternoon sitting in my car in the parking lot of the grocery store and devouring the lives of the Brontes. I stayed so long in the car that I was too hungry to do the grocery shopping and then to go home and make a meal, so it seemed by luck I espied a Chinese Buffet in the same shopping center. Boy was I hungry! So, the books went with me and there was I able to be left in peace to do exactly as Maud was wont to do on occasions of her life, to escape the mundane world of the present and slip into the fascinating lives of the Brontes.