Jane > Recent Status Updates

Her heart—is given him, with all its love and truth. She would joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and think well of. And she says, that lady rich and beautiful that I can never come near.

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and with himself.

Sometimes it rains, and we creep under a boat or the like of that: sometimes it’s dark, and we get among the gaslights, sitting watching the people as they go along the streets. At last, up comes father and takes us home. And home seems such a shelter after out of doors! And father pulls my shoes off, and dries my feet at the fire, and has me to sit by him while he smokes his pipe long after you are abed ....

Mr and Mrs Veneering were brand-new people in a brand-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new .... they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a brand-new baby.

I decide that I will return to these texts and commit an act of wilful erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of women remain. I'll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.

She stole up to her room and closed the door. She stood still with the hand he had kissed pressed against her cheek.

' He loves me,' she said over and over again. 'This is love. I've come to it.'

Strange and wonderful thing; she - Anne - loved and was loved. Life was suddenly suffused with colour. She felt she must look different somehow ...

Under the significance and sadness of the closing of the Convent gates behind her, Anne was conscious of an undercurrent of excitement. The prologue was over - now for Life!

'Flowers may be thought of as delicate and fey, ditzy things that insire fervour in hobbyists and allow those with busier lives to pass by. but they have function and form and, as I was learning, a silent determination to flourish in their own terms. Women have long done the same, this steady upgeaving of expectations and boundaries, and will continue to do so until our efforts are properly acknowledged ...'

I never thought Mum was mad, but a thorn of loving turned inward makes sense to me. Her longing to be loved, to be celebrated, to be seen, to be creative, above all to be free. I wondered if she was soothed by those hundreds, no thousands of hours threading beads, knotting silk between pearls, taking time and care to create beautiful things. Her fingers and her imagination showing the delicacy and burn of her heart.

'I can almost touch the sense of her I had in my chest, then, when I was little and the biggest, most important thing I knew was me love for my beautiful singing mother with her long red hair ...'

I have the most articulate memory of passing the kitchen door one day and seeing Wild Rose suddenly as a person, not a housemaid or a cook. Her hands were on the kitchen table behind her and the curve of her back leaned toward them; her attitude had a easiness, and there was a rough, low tone in her voice. They were speaking ... their voices had another work beyond them ...

Even the servants, who had skirmished endlessly with the nannies, loved Mrs Brock and served her willingly, and at any hour, with cups of tea. She was smallish and on the fat side, but neat as a bird. Perhaps she had more of a flower-like quality, a tidy pink-tipped daisy. Her cheeks were firm and pink, her hair was neat and more blonde than grey, her false teeth gleamed fresh as dew every morning of her life ...

“Never any but fools have ever made love to me! Oh, if an honest, noble man did but love me, and I could marry, and get out of this friendless desolation, this contemptible, scheming, match-making set, where I and my feelings are talked of, speculated on, bandied about from house to house. It is horrible—horrible! But I'll not cry! No!”

He thought of the beautiful tulips which he would see from heaven above, at Ceylon, or Bengal, or elsewhere, when he would be able to look with pity on this earth, where John and Cornelius de Witt had been murdered for having thought too much of politics, and where Cornelius van Baerle was about to be murdered for having thought too much of tulips.

Excellent friends they were, but as jealous as two little dogs, each for ever on the look-out to see that the other got no undue advantage, Each saw every reason why the should make a success of life. But Jane knew that, though she might be one up on Johnny as regards Oxford, owing to slightly superior brain power, he was one up on her as regards Life, owing to that awful business, sex. Women were handicapped ....

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their countryside are equally suburban .... It is good to see trees from city windows, but it is not so good to see houses from country windows. This however,for better or for worse,seems to be California's ideal, and she will not rest until she has finished turning herself into one long and lovely Lower Tooting.

The English have always had this quality of confident security, and this makes them remote from the rest of the world and will always isolate them whether their island continues to be an island or no. It accounts for their universal unpopularity, for their insular stubbornness, their hypocrisy and their profound calm in a crisis. It accounts also for a generous warmth of heart hidden under an absurd armour .....

In Kendal and Penrith and Keswick, men sheltering by fires, busy over their money-making, had only one topic. The Pretender was in Carlisle. Carlisle had fallen. First Edinburgh and now Carlisle. Two women, in a rich house by Grange, quarrelling over cards in their high gilded drawing-room, paused suddenly to listen, because above the fall of the stream under the bridge they seemed to hear the tramp of soldiers ...

His father set him down, and he ran over the threshold of the doorway. The hall where he stood was flooded with moonlight, and opposite him were two shining suits of armour. People were moving and talking behind him, but he did not hear them.

He was first in the house. As he stood there in the moonlight he, who had been asleep so long, was suddenly awake.

And he made his compact with the house.

A young couple are supposed to be happy if they can build their own home. That may be so. For me the theory did not work that way. My favourite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest and suddenly you came across a castle , which in some way had been left for you to wander in ...when I went into my new home, I had just the feeling of the child's story ...