Frances Wilson > Quotes

“Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.”
― Frances Wilson, The Courtesan’s Revenge

“De Quincey remained convinced that the poppy allowed him access to the ‘inner world of secret self-consciousness’ in which ‘each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone’.”
― Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

“Sarah M. Zimmerman, in Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (State University of New York Press, 1999),”
― Frances Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life

“De Quincey eagerly followed the newspaper reports of the events on the Ratcliffe Highway. Murder was an infrequent enough occurrence: only nine of the sixty-seven convicts executed in 1810 had been murderers; more common by far was theft and fraud.”
― Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

“10.  … emancipation from worldly cares – anxieties – and connexions – and from all that is comprehended under the term business”
― Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

“Byron himself and the philosopher William Godwin, who brought along his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – braved the cold to watch the bloated, despairing, opium-exhausted poet swerve violently off course.”
― Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey