“... of arbitrary lines between the dirty and the clean’. Women writers such as Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell could employ and change the concept of modesty in order to find some standing-ground for female resistance, not only to male sexuality as that is imposed on women, but to masculine orderings of the world, and to male ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she began Miss Marjoribanks, Oliphant had taken up Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and found that shecould not help comparing myself with the picture more or less as I read. I don’t suppose my powers are equal to hers … but yet I have had far more experience, and, I think, a fuller conception of life. I have learned to take perhaps ...”

“... 1938, the young Patrick comes unconsciously close to describing himself: Betty is in one of her Brontë-esque moods. Not that I am not very fond of her. But she is inclined to take up that ‘myself-at-war-with-the-universe’ attitude and to think that no one else can ever be affected in the same way. In the long run it is very trying. Patrick and ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she ‘had very little experience dealing with Dark Pasts, apart from close readings of Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) and Rebecca (Du Maurier, 1938)’. One of the group snoops about in Hannah’s garage and finds piles of trail maps, traced with red lines, and a wad of articles on missing persons. Hannah’s plans for a group camping trip in the Great Smokies ...”

“... brotherhood of fiction writers in England’, among them Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, claiming that they revealed more social and political truths than all the moralists and politicians put together; but like his collaborator and financial backer Friedrich Engels he was wary of literary works that had political designs on the ...”

“... Crumb brothers studied Barks and hand-copied his stories.Like a mid-20th-century version of the Brontë siblings, Charles, Robert, Maxon and Carol, their older sister, were all busy making ‘funny animal’ comics. As teenagers, Charles and Robert graduated to individual monthly comic books and also discovered Mad magazine, a primer in dissidence and ...”

“... to position himself. Among the list of influences he cites are the Goncourt brothers, Emily Brontë, Hardy, Tolstoy and Thomas Browne. He’s quick to see the merits of Joyce, praising Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its truth-telling and enviously tracking the progress of Ulysses when it is serialised in the Little Review: ‘Damn! It’s all ...”

“... as much as moorland which seems to have drawn Arnold to Wuthering Heights. To what extent, Brontë asks, does the physical and psychological abuse Heathcliff suffered as a child – ‘enough to make a fiend of a saint’, according to Nelly Dean – explain or even justify his subsequent sadism? Arnold furthers the novel’s preoccupation with the ...”

“... the more sophisticated narrator, just as Jane Austen has a cooler head for fiction than Charlotte Brontë. One can read a Pym again and again, like playing patience or stitching grospoint, but I doubt if even her warmest admirers would want to revisit the Rhys haunts more than once or twice. In the end, Bohemia becomes so boring. In addition to an almost ...”

“... of self-help – 12-point programmes somehow taken to prove that sexism and racism, Emily Brontë and Auschwitz and Steinem’s own romantic dalliance with a politically incorrect millionaire all have to do with lack of ‘self-esteem’. But Gloria is so kind to everybody, smiles so sweetly on the cover, has exposed herself as such a well-meaning and ...”

“... hunt.’ Hearing them hunt becomes the poet’s pleasure, and a source of teasing power. For Emily Brontë the passions of Gondal (‘Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers’) carried the arrested detail and pathos of childhood into adult life. For her, too, love-regret could be an absorbing and solitary game. Not so, one feels, for Christina ...”

“... One of the more useful side-effects of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his new persona as serene literary statesman when he was confronted with an angry protest from women PEN members about the under-representation of women on the programme (16 out of 117 panelists ...”

“... is looking for emerges in the religious or anti-religious sentiments of George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë or even Charlotte M. Yonge. Yet this is not to prove that the English educated classes, or a significant section of them, were never politicised. What about the 1780s and 1790s, which produced a range of writers for whom explicit political comment within ...”