The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing in the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have conceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the true. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. In these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned, a thorough revolutionary.
But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Brontë's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over."
This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), "there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."