Quotes from Claire Harman

Healing, recovering, from a death is also a form of estrangement, a further loss.

who having learnt the art of self-tormenting, are diligently and zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make the real world, with which they must necessarily be conversant, gloomy and insupportable.

What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?-- Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect. Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It's sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect. - Constantin Georges Romain Héger, teacher to Charlotte Brontë

Katherine Mansfield, clearly speaking personally, had remarked wryly in 1924 that "the true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone—reading between the lines—has become the secret friend of their author,"54

The convention of not answering back allows able women a scornful superiority, flashing out in looks, in suppression of comment, withheld speech; quellingly disdainful, devastatingly critical, but always held in check. This pent-up power, secretly triumphant because unrealised, is the incendiary device at the heart of Jane Eyre, and of all Charlotte Brontë's works.

Mrs. Bennet, Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Elton, the Steele sisters, Fanny Dashwood, Elizabeth Elliot, Mrs. Clay, Lady Catherine de Bourgh … all differentiated, all unique in their unpleasantness.

What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances .34

she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.34

fame can be thought of as having four elements: a person, an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity makes of them.

Even Austen's famous first sentence has an echo in one of Burney's: "[It is] received wisdom among matchmakers, that a young lady without fortune has a less and less chance of getting off upon every public appearance."44

Aunt Cassandra used to relish rereading letters of Jane's "triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom

1894, George Saintsbury was confident that "a fondness for Miss Austen" could be considered "itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity.

The titles that went down spectacularly well with this new mass audience were, predictably, the most sensational ones, like Bulwer's Paul Clifford (a gripping outlaw tale, published in 1830*2), Bulwer's fictionalized account of the real-life murderer Eugene Aram (1832), or Charles Whitehead's Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers (1834). They spawned a whole school of criminal romance

A life of usefulness, literature and religion, was not by any means a life of event.