Claire Harman > Quotes

“Healing, "recovering," from a death is also a form of estrangement, a further loss.”
― Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart

“The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oafs, and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned with in these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day [that] the time I am losing will never come again?”
― Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life

“When Crimsworth praises Frances’s devoir and counsels her to cultivate her faculties, she replies not in words, but with a smile ‘in her eyes...almost triumphant,’ which seems to mean the following: ‘I am glad you have been forced to discover so much of my nature; you need not so carefully moderate your language. Do you think I am myself a stranger to myself? What you tell me in terms so qualified, I have known fully from a child.’ No words are uttered; that would be unseemly, and, the author implies, somewhat redundant.”
― Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart

“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”
― Claire Harman

“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.”
― Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life

“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”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“A life of usefulness, literature and religion, was not by any means a life of event.”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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,”
― Claire Harman, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London

“Dickens was already planning a novel of his own which would develop several of the themes in “A Visit to Newgate,” to be called Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London, set during the period of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in the 1780s. But while Sketches by Boz was being prepared for the press, he was diverted by a request to write some stories to accompany a set of sporting prints. The result was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the first and least typical of all the great novels which were to flow subsequently”
― Claire Harman, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London

“Aunt Cassandra used to relish rereading letters of Jane’s “triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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.”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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.”
― Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life

“fame can be thought of as having four elements: a person, an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity makes of them.”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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.”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

“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”
― Claire Harman, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World