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“... there was no doubt that more women than men were reading them. For most of the 1860s, Mrs Henry Wood and Margaret Oliphant outsold not only Trollope, but Dickens and Thackeray too. In the 1870s, it was George Eliot who reigned, and when Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd appeared in 1874 the Spectator declared that she must be its real author, and that if ...”

“... of C.S. Lewis’s distasteful Narnia series, in which a wardrobe gives onto an extraterrestrial wood. The central characters in Lewis’s religious fantasies are a lot of dead children – a motif we might have expected to find discarded by the 1950s. Kingsley, writing in 1862, had used it to better effect. Macdonald himself, in Lilith, invented a country ...”

“... parts 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 ...”

“... So we have innumerable studies of Félicité de Genlis, of Madame Roland, of Charlotte Corday who was famous for fifteen minutes. There were the marginal, romanticised figures like Théroigne de Méricourt, held to be a very salutary example of what revolution does to women, since she was very violent – though fetchingly pretty – and ...”

“... enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of rhetoric can tell us how the effect is achieved; but the truth of the information is what really matters, as when Donne tells us: ’Tis the year’s ...”

“... up in her propeller and she had to cut herself free while also keeping her wildly juddering balsa-wood craft under control, she defeated the world-class German racer Herr Krueger and became an instant national heroine. (‘Shingled Girl Beats German’ was the Daily Mail’s headline the next day.) As she piled up victory after victory over the next two years ...”

“... The only surfaces with a good echo are the ones on the boat itself – fibreglass, metal, wood. And when the engine is running it lays a steady thrum over any lower sounds. What that means in practice is that all the sibilants get knocked out of speech: Nyoupuenerou? Ucuthemooinroe? Ilanacoupleougarleae? Where Dillon relied on continued literary ...”

“... for an older woman – often resolving into psychic violence – has long been a classic theme. Charlotte Brontë’s excoriating portrait of Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly an attack on some detested female oppressor of her youth: Brontë’s description fairly seethes with murderous venom. Edith Wharton heroines, steely girls on the make such as Lily ...”

“... with a New 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 ...”

“... that Isabel, and indeed the reader, should know about her, just as it becomes essential for Charlotte Stant and Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl. They need their secret understood not to clear the air, but to have something recorded and known because private life and private acts are not enough; the art of loving and wanting involves, even in the most ...”

“... recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of ...”

“... was then in his late sixties, lived on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants. Less conventionally, he also lived with seven Degas paintings. In 1876 he bought four ballet pictures from the London branch of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture ...”

“... always cross the road and stay away. In 1791 the gateway opened into a yard, with sheds where wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a ...”

“... house with embroidered curtains, a stereo, a television, a large drinks bar made of finely worked wood and framed photos of him and his wife, Rosa-Isela, Pancho’s sister. ‘All this comes from my work,’ he says sadly, standing in the middle of the living-room, in front of a blue velour sofa where a small child is sleeping calmly. ‘But I fell into ...”

“... burden. The cofferdams are required to detour around recovered stakes of ancient blackened wood, Anglo-Saxon fish traps. Experienced divers submerge in lightless filth. Triple-glazed windows and complimentary holidays don’t help the Thamesbank witnesses. The collateral damage of excavation has forced them to yield their privileged views and move ...”