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“... and William Morris as a Victorian. But the two best pieces are on George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. In a study of Middlemarch, Briggs shows how Lydgate’s success as a doctor and failure as a medical reformer can only be understood with reference to the contemporary debates on public health, both at the time when Eliot wrote and of the time in which ...”

“... was a founder member of the Black Sash; a ring her mother thought had once belonged to Charlotte Brontë turns out, after a trip to Haworth, probably not to have done so after all. But the book neither tells enough of a story, nor offers a strong enough sense of character. Aware, perhaps, of the problem, Picardie starts patching in material from other genres ...”

“... of the five authors in The Disappearance of God (the others are De Quincey, Browning, Emily Brontë and Gerard Manley Hopkins), even though the book is profoundly concerned with its subjects’ own hesitations and hoverings between literary engagement and disengagement. That – in the 1960s – was then, and those were different critical times. But ...”

“... have drawn comparisons to Borges and Calvino, two among the five authors (the others are Emily Brontë, Halldór Laxness and Proust) whose books Murnane said in a 2001 lecture were the only ones the then 62-year-old wanted to reread before he died. (He supplemented this list with the Australians Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd as well as the ...”

“... of the empire; Charles Dickens wrote about his hatred of ‘telescopic philanthropy’; Charlotte Brontë represented Jamaica as a place of degeneracy and corruption in Jane Eyre; Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ rested on an absolutist assumption of the need for racial hierarchies. The links between English nationalism and racism ...”

“... Lucy Harrison, who had cropped hair, a passion for the work of Alice Meynell and Emily Brontë, and who eventually eloped with another schoolmistress to Yorkshire. Charlotte Mew copied the crop and thrilled to the readings of Alice Meynell’s ‘To a Daisy’. When Miss Harrison, showing signs of ‘strain’, was advised by the school’s ...”

“... sphere’, but only in order to insist on all that that sphere seems to shut out. Like Charlotte Brontë (whose own Jane Eyre, however, she would later pronounce ‘much over-rated’), Barrett found her celebrated predecessor seriously wanting in ‘poetry’ and soul: ‘Her human creatures never look up; and when they look within it is not deeply ...”

“... his diary, ‘both witty and profound’. He invited her to Cambridge to see the Fitzwilliam’s Brontë manuscripts, and ‘after tea we sat on the grass, looking at the water-lilies.’ In London they had little suppers in restaurants and saw Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder arms and Noel Coward in Hay Fever. To Cockerell it seemed that she was subsisting on ...”

“... from ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (in translation) rubs shoulders with a piece by Emily Brontë. In place of chronology and historical context we have the ‘eternal’ spirit of place, since the poetry is always ‘rooted’ in a particular spot. And since some of the poets included were themselves a bit coy about the exact grid references for ...”

“... then, for a time, to London – to send the children regularly to school. Instead, much like the Brontë and Alcott broods, the children educated themselves, writing a family paper and listening in when London’s radical intelligentsia (the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, the Fabian Annie Besant, and a host of suffragists and ...”

“... vain woman – that is to say, a woman with self-respect – is spurred on by spite. Had the Rev. Brontë supported and encouraged his daughters’ ambitions, what would the poor things have done then? I don’t think Leonard Woolf did his wife a favour by mothering her. After Colette met kind, sweet, intelligent, loving Goudeket, she wrote very little major ...”

“... writers would lean towards the 19th century, and would not be complete without Austen, Emily Brontë or George Eliot. The few novelists on the Irish version wrote, in a way that neither Austen nor Bowen ever could, not just about the poor and the marginal but transgressively about backsides and excrement (Joyce is the only one who wrote about sex). I ...”

“... life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only ...”

“... the one that gives them their endurance. In one letter Engel speaks of her preference for Emily Brontë over Charlotte, which is easy to suspect. Cathy froths at the mouth and gets down on all fours, she is a creature, but she is also unencumbered by our scratchiest and most hated hereditary garment: shame. The voice in her head is her own, and what it says ...”

“... York return address. The contents – a brief fan letter about a piece I’d written on Charlotte Brontë and a flamboyantly inscribed paperback copy of her play, Alice in Bed (‘from Susan’) – made me dizzy with ecstasy. Having idolised Sontag literally for decades – I’d first read ‘Notes on Camp’ as an exceedingly arch nine-year-old – I felt ...”