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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Orchard Pavilion, The Happy Threshold, Where No Fear Was and an edition of unpublished Emily Brontë poems.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what life is’; going further, it may be, than Woolf herself ever did in her fictions.Charlotte Brontë was perhaps like Woolf in seeing only what one might call the outside of these romances, given that she defined their writer as cold and passionless. If she had been these things, Jane Austen would probably not have spent a brilliant adolescence so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its power. There is a line to be traced from Coleridge through writers as different as Charlotte Brontë, whose cold missionary St John Rivers is plainly Evangelical; through Dickens’s Chadband, insisting on telling the ‘Terewth’; through Samuel Butler’s Pontifex and right up to the present moment, where David Hare’s Racing Demon (a tragedy of the ...”

“... 19th century were celibate – “spinsters and virgins”, as Ellen Moers calls them. If Emily Brontë and Jane Austen managed without having sex, why not Cather? Because we think she was homosexual?’ To appreciate a great book, she asserts, we need not gossip, like silly adolescents, over its author’s life between the sheets. To subject someone as ...”

“... Since the Times was launched in 1851, the omissions go back a long way. They include Charlotte Brontë and stretch to Scott Joplin, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.On 26 June this year, the paper ran a belated obituary of Valerie Solanas, who died in 1988 and is famous for having shot Andy Warhol twenty years earlier. The year before the ...”

“... and one of those blonde, seraphic goody-goodies one could never stand in primary school. Charlotte Brontë would have loathed her. And for every Blanche, it seems, there are always women like the unhappy Lange Vaubernier – better known as Madame du Barry, the one-time mistress of Louis XV. On her way to execution, according to Lamartine’s Histoire des ...”