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“... There is a moment in Jane Barker’s 1723 novel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, which prefigures Jane Eyre, and makes one wonder how much or how little 19th-century women like Charlotte Brontë were acquainted with their sister writers (as Barker might have put it) of this earlier period. Barker’s heroine, Galesia, is supporting herself by practising medicine in London while at the same time writing poetry, a passion she finds it impossible to resist, ‘poetry being one of those subtle devils, that if driven out by never so many firm purposes, good resolutions, aversion to that poverty it entails upon its adherents; yet it will always return and find a passage to the heart, brain, and whole interior ...”

“... Frances Soundy​ lived in Battersea. She had several children and a husband who periodically disappeared. Off and on, throughout the 1820s, she wrote to the church wardens and overseers of the parish of Pangbourne in Berkshire asking for money. One son needed shoes, another clothes; the rent was due; debts had mounted. Mrs Soundy was apologetic: ‘Honerable Gentilmen I ham sorry to have the misfortchin of havin the unplesent nessesity of making application unto you for relefe I ham sorry to say my husband as left me a gain with 3 small children goin the fortnight and will not give me one farthen to by them a bit of bred ...”

“... The first edition of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More sold out within three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint ...”

“... Is​ there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed. Despite these works, and the other poems, plays, histories, biographies and essays he also produced, a tone of condescension has tended to accompany Goldsmith’s name, so that Adam Sisman in his book on Boswell could describe Goldsmith as ‘an awkward, improvident and slightly ridiculous Irishman … whose genius [Johnson] nevertheless acknowledged and championed’ – though in fact almost every reference to Goldsmith in the Life of Samuel Johnson itself belittles him ...”

“... a woman wanted a champion,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she pays tribute to A.C. Elias’s invaluable 1997 edition). Correcting the long-standing categorisation of Pilkington as a ‘scandalous memoirist’ (her story was advertised alongside ...”

“... the pleasures of the table and eventually ate himself to death.) Hester’s adult writing life, Norma Clarke has observed, could be said to have begun at that dinner table, where she first met Johnson in January 1765. ‘He has fastened many of his own Notions on my Mind … that I am not sure whether they grew there originally or no: of this I am ...”

“... as to amp up the gore and show breasts and bottoms when the story doesn’t need them. Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, went along with the ‘fucking ton of nudity’ in the first season. ‘Eventually, however, she began to wonder if so much nudity was essential, and became less obliging,’ Biskind writes. He quotes her: ‘I’ve had ...”