“... his own exuberant liberty. Private Papers makes the most responsible and unexpected use of Emily Brontë and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But it is Robert Browning who fails to furnish the one thing needed, and this is where the novel fails. The dramatic monologue, after all, grew out of the epistolary novel. Forster is writing essentially an epistolary ...”

“... be a surrogate creativity, a displacement of their natural function. (Southey wrote to Charlotte Brontë: ‘The more [a woman] is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for literature.’) So many women writers weren’t mothers (chose not to be mothers?); mostly, no doubt, because of the practical impossibility of finding enough hours ...”

“... steered me away from mistakes’, she says: ‘Finally, there is my mother, who gave me Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen to read when I was very young’. Perhaps Shakespeare and Milton were unmentionable. The edition that appears under the Oxford imprint is in fact bodily the US one, US spelling, printing and all. Only in the blurb on the jacket is there ...”

“... achievement to bring, as she did, a speaking voice and manner into poetry. There is, too, Emily Brontë, who has hardly yet had full justice as a poet; I will record, without offering it as a checked and deliberated critical judgment, the remembered impression that her ‘Cold in the Earth’ is the finest poem in the 19th-century part of The Oxford Book of ...”

“... Swift, Pope, Gray, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Blake, Burns, Shelley, Lamb, Charlotte Brontë and Dickens. Amis is hardly the only 20th-century writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... obliged to tell tales. ‘In the devious world of Villette,’ Tony Tanner said of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, most of which is set in Brussels, ‘everyone spies on everyone else, the watcher is watched with a minimum of eye-to-eye contact. It is a very voyeuristic world.’ Baudelaire, who also noted the spying, said it was boredom that led to it.When ...”

“... herself: all were thought to be locked away in an attic, and not one of them was . . . Charlotte Brontë was quite specific about where Bertha (Alice sometimes thought of Mrs Rochester by just her Christian name, as if she knew her well) was: in a room on the third storey, the floor below the attics . . . The detail Alice most admired in The Picture of ...”

“... told after years of concealment that Ruskin did not consummate his marriage and that Charlotte Brontë fancied the headmaster. Still, it was Mrs Sloss’s decision; and she was right. I think, not to be held back by any thoughts of the distress her frankness might cause the faithful. There was a time, certainly, when it might have caused total ...”

“... For most of her adult life, she needed the financial support of her brother William Michael. The Brontë sisters also tried to set up a school – a regular ploy among educated women without money or husbands in the mid-Victorian period. They too failed. Then Emily and Anne died. Charlotte didn’t have a well-funded and well-disposed brother to help ...”

“... successfully. To take the case of fiction: some excellent dreams recorded in the novels of Emily Brontë, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust are included here. Nightmares, one apiece, from Wuthering Heights and The Idiot are truly horrendous, while Tolstoy’s uncanny understanding of the function and procedures of dreaming, as made clear in Anna’s dream of ...”

“... that wasn’t mine. I had thought that that was the purpose of art. Times have changed. Charlotte Brontë concealed her identity so that she could be taken seriously; a man could write Jane Eyre but a woman could not. A woman writes as a man so that she can write about a woman. A white man writes as an Asian woman so that he can write about an Asian girl. At ...”

“... happens. The other line of descent from the 19th century begins with Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë famously objected to Austen’s ‘Chinese fidelity’ to the external world of the real and material, and to ‘the smooth elegance’ of her narrative. However partial that view of Austen, she certainly understands dress entirely from the ...”

“... don’t have to work for, and thus an appropriate mode for upper-class layabouts. When Charlotte Brontë named Jane Eyre’s would-be seducer Rochester, it was this lineage of high-class moral ruffians she had in mind. Her hero belongs to that pantheon of literary characters who are beguiling not despite their wickedness but because of it. Rochester is ...”

“... potentiality. So was a phrase she liked using at this time about ‘kissing the dead lips of Emily Brontë’. Unlike Barker, Elizabeth always expressed herself with the clarity of the true egotist. As recorded in By Grand Central Station, she met him first in California, having manipulated his appearance with some care, probably sending him the money for a ...”