“... 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 ...”

“... her other predecessor, Jane Eyre. And in Jamaica Inn (1936), which also dresses down the combative Brontë spirit (this time of Wuthering Heights), the heroine finally realises that as a woman ‘she had no will of her own.’ But to equate a disabused realism with misogyny is to forget that feminism was born from a similar diagnosis of female oppression, as ...”

“... other novelists were put in the dock as minor accomplices of Dickens, including Charlotte Brontë and her biographer, Mrs Gaskell (shocking irresponsibility about proven facts in both cases), while Charles Reade was given a particularly severe wigging for his novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend. This tale was, admittedly, based on an actual legal ...”

“... of the literati’. But the double story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is material for an Emily Brontë or a Henry James, a great ghost story with the roles of haunter and haunted, villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its orbit, to make you feel that ...”

“... At this point, a new family arrives in Grimshaw’s parish, which is called Haworth: their name is Brontë. Virginie, by John Hawkes, proclaims its intentions boldly on its pretty jacket: ‘a lush erotic masterpiece,’ runs the legend, beneath a reproduction of Greuze’s Cruche Cassée. One may in fact wonder whether it was the picture that gave rise to the ...”

“... her destiny, with little to help her but courage and persistence – like any heroine of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot or Henry James. She makes her way with touching serenity through a country which is in a state of turmoil and ferment. Not at all ‘feminist’, but a striking statement of the cause feminists have at heart – and all the more striking ...”

“... who held Flaubert’s interest for so long a period would have been more highly educated, like Mr Brontë.’ This is unfair to governesses! – and, I would say, to Flaubert too. However, all is well, on that front at any rate, for Mr Herbert was a master builder (if a small one) and even, in 1831, enjoyed the professional privilege of bankruptcy. Who could ...”

“... pathos. Morality says let love all hang out: Art says No. The final word for Hartley is with Emily Brontë, the couplet that prefaces the Eustace and Hilda trilogy. ‘I’ve known a hundred kinds of love / All made the loved one rue.’ At the same time his best novels fairly vibrate with the emotion. Love-avoidance, like tax-avoidance, in which he also ...”

“... Berman a perfectly ridiculous analysis of the child’s eye as used by Dickens and by Charlotte Brontë, in which Miss Murdstone’s ‘hard steel purse’ is interpreted as a threat of vagina dentata – but which is redeemed by two of Fritz Eichenberg’s exquisitely potent illustrations to (whose edition of?) Jane Eyre. The ‘Signal’ Approach to ...”

“... coming up with paradoxical comparisons for dustjackets: ‘Brighton Rock written by Charlotte Brontë’; ‘the Camus of the backpacking generation’. Not all ladies have become women. In a chapter here on P.D. James, Martin Priestman records her distrust of ambitious professional women, approval of loyal housekeepers and disdain for people who say ...”

“... Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double act, acclaiming each other’s masterpieces; for decades she was a figure on the literary scene, a regular ...”

“... arguably Norman’s management of that reflex is the dominant theme of his life.’ Like Emily Brontë and Truman Capote, he found life more natural in the anterooms of invention, and in his case such rooms were spread across continents. He could be depressive, and he relied on his writing powers to release him from that. At the centre of Evans’s ...”

“... which brought more prestige than income. Like Tennyson’s despondent father, or the fiery Patrick Brontë, Gabriele Rossetti was a displaced figure. His thwarted ambitions shadowed and deepened the lives of his children. All four took it for granted that they would not be ordinary. It was the children’s responsibility to justify their father’s life and to ...”

“... point is, surely, that she never controlled or occupied her novels, in the sense that Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot were to do. Her greatest strength is to be herself at the side of her official theme, never wholly identified with it. Even in Mansfield Park, where she deliberately and very impressively takes on a large social and symbolic theme, there ...”