“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... even the well-to-do people of West Yorkshire were capable of conducting their affairs. Branwell Brontë, another imperious Tory, was also burned in effigy two years later as a result of his intervention in local politics. Haworth is around twelve miles from Halifax, and Lister’s diaries shed a good deal of light on the kind of provincial society that gave ...”

“... and Light, presided over by her literary idols: ‘George Eliot doing Social Services, Emily Brontë over at Police, Jane Austen in Bridges and Tunnels, Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe sharing Health.’ She gets a chance to realise some of her dreams, when she inadvertently creates a female golem who calls herself Xanthippe and helps her ...”