The Project Gutenberg Project

The quiet life lived by the Brontës in the vicarage on the edge of the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to the casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. The purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature here as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnest and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life.

- Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]

Mary Shelley had inherited from her mother the world’s frown.

- Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]

Like Shakespeare Jane Austen knew the inner nature by intuition, and had learned its outward expression by observation. Character not only affects the speech of each one of her men and women, but determines their destiny and shapes the plot of the story.

- Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]

(Happy birthday, Jane!)

The writings of many of the women considered in this volume have sunk into an oblivion from which their intrinsic merit should have preserved them. This is partly due to the fact that nearly all the books on literature have been written from a man’s stand-point.

- Clara H. Whitmore, Preface to Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]

They seldom use stereotyped words or phrases, yet their conversation is a crystal from which the whole mental horizon of the speaker shines forth. When Mrs. Bennet learns that Netherfield Park has been let to a single gentleman of fortune, her first exclamation comes from the heart—”What a fine thing for our girls!”

- Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]

There is hardly a story of Mrs. Gaskell’s which is not adorned by the friendship of the heroine for some other woman in the book.

- Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909) [full text]