Charlotte Brontë’s gatekeeping of Ellen Nussey’s reading was fairly typical of Victorian attitudes towards Romantic, and specifically Byronic, writings. Her advice that Ellen should avoid Lord Byron’s epic, Don Juan and perhaps ‘Cain’ indicates the circumspection with which respectable Victorians, especially women, were to navigate the dangerous ideas within Byron’s work. Ellen was the more conventional and conservative of Charlotte’s childhood friends, and her social affluence would have ensured her reading remained within the realms of prescribed respectability for women. It was with Mary Taylor, the intelligent and unorthodox thinker, that Charlotte discussed books, ideas and her own work. The loss of the letters between these two friends is irreparable, but we can easily imagine that they discussed the merits and faults of Byron’s poetry, and the radicalism of his ideas. These were discussions Charlotte could never have with Ellen whose delicate sensibilities Charlotte strove to protect, even in adulthood, from the threat of their pernicious corruption by Lord Byron’s writing.