“... 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 ...”

“... of a first-person narrative, nearly as canonical since the time of Constant or Charlotte Brontë, to lengths never attempted before, if also without overmuch coherence: the narrator not only reports Swann in the third person, but assumes on occasion an impossible omniscience in the first person. By the time Powell started to write, the interior ...”