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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Two of the finest works of post-war Sicilian fiction were published in Italy in 1958: Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard and Leonardo Sciascia’s Sicilian Uncles, a collection of three (in subsequent editions four) stories dealing with themes from Sicily’s history and experience of foreign intervention which had also interested Lampedusa ...”

“... gains. Gothic, as this book recognises, is all about power and domination: the fiction of the Brontë sisters, in which there is hardly a human relationship that does not involve a sado-masochistic power-struggle, is Gothic in just this sense. The Gothic is one of the first great imaginative ventures into what we would nowadays call sexual ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a Wife and Robert Elsmere, fallen favourites; bored heroines in Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in Eliot, James, Waugh, Lawrence, Stein, Brookner, Berryman, Barthelme and Bellow. This list represents only a part of the vast amount of material covered by Spacks; her book sometimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”