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“... in the course of my research for a biography of Constantin Heger, who taught Emily and Charlotte Brontë French during their time in Brussels and with whom Charlotte fell in love. I’d been trying to find out about his brother Vital, a sales representative for the royal carpet factory in Tournai and decided to look through the catalogue of the Musée royal ...”

“... When Charlotte Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also made clear that her habit of day-dreaming threatened to unfit her for the ‘ordinary uses’ of the world ...”

“... by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her ...”

“... and connections with other work. The six major works – the five novels and The Life of Charlotte Brontë, each with its own editor – are based on consistent source editions and are accompanied by notes on textual revisions; all have substantive introductions. Gaskell has always been described as a storyteller; it was one of the things she called ...”

“... In August 1845, Branwell Brontë, ill-starred drug-addict brother of the celebrated trio, took a trip from the Haworth family home to Liverpool. It was on the very eve of the Irish famine, and the city was soon to be thronged with its hungry victims. Many of them would have been Irish speakers, since it was the Irish-speaking poorer classes that the famine hit hardest ...”

“... thus allied herself with the intruders and the voyeurs. As a biographer and as a scholar of the Brontë family – she was for many years curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum – Ms Barker has a stake in Charlotte’s accidental discovery and in Nussey’s obstinacy, even in the salacious speculation she deplores. But ...”

“... Dr Leavis observed, before directing our attention to George Eliot, that there is ‘only one Brontë’ – meaning Emily – and even Mrs Leavis was awed by Wuthering Heights. The only dissentient voice I can think of is Ivy Compton-Burnett’s, whose crisp verdict was that the book had received all, indeed more than all, the praise that was its ...”

“... it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”’ Charlotte Brontë, with bitter memories of her own life as a governess, has Shirley Keeldar make the same point to a poor friend: ‘Be a governess! Better be a slave at once.’ Gwendolen Harleth’s resistance is firm: ‘I would rather emigrate than be a ...”

“... heated dispute, when Mrs Gaskell’s biography was published, over the authenticity of Charlotte Brontë’s harrowing depiction of the scene of her childhood suffering. Jane Eyre’s Lowood School was, Charlotte claimed, ‘true’ and ‘photographed’ from the reality of the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge. Those who knew the school and its ...”

“... Jane Eyre is a different matter, and Tess Cosslett is surely right to emphasise Charlotte Brontë’s unobtrusive skill in demonstrating such a sensibility in relation to female comradeship. Lucy and Polly and Paulina, Shirley and Caroline, ‘bring each other out’ much more subtly than do their creator’s specifically feminine ...”

“... to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the ...”

“... if today is your example today I could get back the cold slope just a foil the drear rain almost Brontë but one day no, one day that dark mud is the whole rigging the entire arrangement every north south sideways song pleading past the end of the soundtrack and then we’ll see and then we’ll spend, then we’ll be the burners Go snow woke me, light ...”

“... opposition to women’s suffrage is an embarrassment, and it is not encouraging to find Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth ...”

“... with a glimpse of hell. Vashti is easily identified as the tragedian Elisa Rachel, whom Charlotte Brontë had seen in London in 1851. Sarah Bernhardt may be better known today, but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the ...”

“... itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen that their readers (perhaps particularly the male ones) only notice it in terms of their own feeling of gratified response to what seems a subtlety of fellow-feeling, a gratifyingly tacit appeal to their own insight and ...”