It is now exactly seventeen years ago since I published a volume not dissimilar in form to this under the title of _Charlotte Bronte and her Circle_.

The title had then an element of novelty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's _Dante and his Circle_, at the time the only book of this particular character, having quite another aim.

There are now some twenty or more biographies based upon a similar plan.[1] The method has its convenience where there are earlier lives of a given writer, as one can in this way differentiate the book from previous efforts by making one's hero stand out among his friends.

Some such apology, I feel, is necessary, because, in these days of the multiplication of books, every book, at least other than a work of imagination, requires ample apology.
In _Charlotte Bronte and her Circle_ I was able to claim that, even though following in the footsteps of Mrs.Gaskell, I had added some four hundred new letters by Charlotte Bronte to the world's knowledge of that interesting woman, and still more considerably enlarged our knowledge of her sister Emily.

This achievement has been generously acknowledged, and I am most proud of the testimony of the most accomplished of living biographers, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who once rendered me the following quite spontaneous tribute: We have lately read _aloud_ for the second time your Bronte book; let alone private readings.