“... biographer and countess was president of the Jane Austen Society (along with the Johnson Society, Brontë Society and Dickens Fellowship), claimed that Thompson, like Austen (and perhaps equally falsely), had to write in secret because of family disapproval. Ronald Blythe, reviewing Lark Rise to Candleford in the TLS in 1979, accused John of being ‘crushing ...”

“... Gubar study recurrent forms of female rebellion in the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Dickinson herself, centring on the symbol of Bertha Mason rampaging in the attic. Socially she is there because of the power of fathers and husbands. Imaginatively, her shouts and incendiarism are the result of female writers wanting to ...”

“... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...”

“... rolls the river thro’ the narrow plain.’ This voice is evident in Wordsworth, Byron, Emily Brontë and the Ann Radcliffe of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. It can be heard, too, in Walter Scott, who was also impressed by Macpherson’s ability to capture attention outside Britain. Ossian’s tone is that of the Scotland which was central to the ...”

“... aware and experimental novels of men? – has been going on since Jane Austen’s day. Charlotte Brontë was one who rejected Austen’s plot, which she called ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden’. Recently Gillian Beer even announced the death of the traditional women’s novel: instead of the masochistic themes of unrequited love, she said at ...”

“... professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets. But Pushkin is more various than Brontë, apparently, more resourceful in relation to the wider circuit of experience available to him. Poetry for Pushkin was a means ...”

“... and Ibsen are great dramatists in part because of their ‘centrality to their times’, Emily Brontë, Dickens and Hardy earn praise because they ‘burst the buckles of bourgeois consciousness’. There is quite a bit of pro-Soviet claptrap to be found here, as in a piece dated 1959 which says that ‘Soviet culture today is an infinitely ...”

“... Brophy shrewdly says, were the result ‘not of sexual but of literary frustration’. Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre were to come out from under her cloak in time, as Dostoevsky says that Russian literature came from under Gogol’s overcoat. The section on baroque is a little – indeed not so little – masterpiece, packed with insights and concluding ...”

“... is cold-calling talk show hosts to promote Wistful Moors, a novel based on the life of Charlotte Brontë. Seeking authenticity, she moves into a grungy walk-up on the Upper West Side, learns to avoid the drug dealers, and begins to love New York, or at least parts of it: ‘the undulating expanse of Central Park, like actors offstage waving a giant green ...”

“... is enough to unsettle the city for me. This is not like visiting the real home of the real Emily Brontë or the real home of the imaginary Leopold Bloom, it’s like stumbling into a fiction you feel you may not be able to get out of. ‘Argentinians don’t believe in circumstances,’ Borges once wrote. The context is a rather flimsy essay called ‘Our ...”

“... Jane Eyre, and makes one wonder how much or how little 19th-century women like Charlotte Brontë were acquainted with their sister writers (as Barker might have put it) of this earlier period. Barker’s heroine, Galesia, is supporting herself by practising medicine in London while at the same time writing poetry, a passion she finds it impossible to ...”

“... of their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in ...”

“... of women, and Lewes even delivered himself of some frightful nonsense when reviewing Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley: ‘The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, Maternity ... What should we do with a leader of the opposition in the seventh month of her pregnancy? ... or a chief justice with twins?’ There may have ...”

“... consciences of Henry James or Hugh Walpole, or even with the heroines of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë – all of whom can make a pleasure in being themselves so endearing. Buchan’s Hannay is the only hero in the same line with whom Bond has anything in common. Fleming’s villains are totally derivative and standardised but they too have one genuinely ...”

“... dead.’ A servant’s alliance with death, the final leveller, is more usually submerged. Emily Brontë’s Nelly Dean, with her brisk insistence that the families she serves should eat their dinners up and generally try to behave more sensibly, is at first sight just the sort of practical and reasonable body who can be depended on to keep life going. And ...”