Wendy Tuell

“She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I felt at once that her opinion of me--her feeling towards me--was unchanged and unchangeable. I knew by her stony eye--opaque to tenderness, indissoluble to tears--that she was resolved to consider me bad to the last; because to believe me good would give her no generous pleasure: only a sense of mortification.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House