“... writers would lean towards the 19th century, and would not be complete without Austen, Emily Brontë or George Eliot. The few novelists on the Irish version wrote, in a way that neither Austen nor Bowen ever could, not just about the poor and the marginal but transgressively about backsides and excrement (Joyce is the only one who wrote about sex). I ...”

“... life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only ...”

“... John Braine evinced by their brisk departure from their Bradford birthplace. In this respect the Brontë Sisters (Mam had seen the films, though she’d not read the books) were thought to be tragic figures, not on account of their bleak upbringing or their short lives, but because, so far as Mam knew anyway, they had never escaped from that terrible ...”

“... York return address. The contents – a brief fan letter about a piece I’d written on Charlotte Brontë and a flamboyantly inscribed paperback copy of her play, Alice in Bed (‘from Susan’) – made me dizzy with ecstasy. Having idolised Sontag literally for decades – I’d first read ‘Notes on Camp’ as an exceedingly arch nine-year-old – I felt ...”

“... on a nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is ...”

“... the one that gives them their endurance. In one letter Engel speaks of her preference for Emily Brontë over Charlotte, which is easy to suspect. Cathy froths at the mouth and gets down on all fours, she is a creature, but she is also unencumbered by our scratchiest and most hated hereditary garment: shame. The voice in her head is her own, and what it says ...”

“... to her literary criticism. ‘Independence is an unwanted necessity,’ she writes of Charlotte Brontë, ‘but a condition much thought about. All of one’s strength will be needed to maintain it; it is fate, a destiny to be confronted if not enjoyed.’Lowell knew that The Dolphin would be a humiliation for Hardwick. ‘Lizzie is the heroine,’ he wrote ...”

“... sibling amorosity finds perhaps its most unabashed literary champion since Byron or Emily Brontë. Yet none of this assertiveness would count for much, of course, without the collateral gratifications of style, and Victorine’s most important claim on us is stylistic. Like it or not – and some may not – Maude Hutchins can write with perverse and ...”

“... North Country, among which we can include the confluence of two streams near Haworth, which Emily Brontë called ‘the meeting of the waters’. I have found 15 in Ireland, and in Australia and New Zealand about forty, some no doubt settlements established by the Irish diaspora, the majority known by names in indigenous languages which are uniformly ...”

“... The Orchard Pavilion, The Happy Threshold, Where No Fear Was and an edition of unpublished Emily Brontë poems. Fred was even worse: in 1913 he wrote three novels in eight months – David Blaize, The Freaks of Mayfair and Mike. In the last three years of his life he managed eight books. Of his ‘masterpiece’ As We Were (1932), his modern biographer ...”

“... was emotionally candid, also ‘performed secular masculinity’. Here is Hardwick on Emily Brontë:Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an ...”

“... have read. But say you did go looking for it, as a Proust reader might go looking for Combray, or Brontë fans for Wuthering Heights, and say even that you found the address, it still would not be as Kafka or as Joseph K describes it. These days the stone would have been scrubbed, the brick pointed, the mouldings given back their old (which is to say their ...”

“... which has promoted the Cotswolds as England’s imaginary heart, has perhaps less taste than Emily Brontë for the wild solitudes of the moors; indeed Charles Jennings in Up North, his ‘travels beyond the Watford Gap’, an only half-humorous exploration of regional difference, complains that the North is deficient in open space. In the current denigration ...”

“... The decline of the so-called Cuban cultural renaissance started when Virgilio Pinera came down the ladder of the Czech airplane that brought him back from Brussels via Prague. He deplaned with mincing steps and, fluttering like a tropical butterfly suddenly sprung alive from a collector’s case, stopped briefly and then kneeled and leaned forward to kiss the red Cuban soil – only to smack the tarmac instead ...”

“... misery caused her to examine her whole life, to face what lay ahead,’ she writes of Charlotte Brontë, ‘and if she found little to be optimistic about, at least she knew how to think deeply, and in a new way, on the condition of loneliness and deprivation. This was important because the condition was then and is always shared by so many.’ In ...”