Jude Morgan

“I have never understood why a woman must have a man to take her into dinner.”

“Society can only hurt if you care for its opinion”

“There are some people who like nothing better than a good, regular quarrel.”

“I am afraid I shall disappoint people's expectations dreadfully.”

“It is presumptuous to draw conclusions about a person from what one has heard”

“Everything about everybody was very soon known by everybody else.”

“To marry is to narrow one's possibilities horribly.”

“The glitter of the great world, you know, is only so much froth and spume: you may look in vain for happiness there.”

“To assume is to presume.”

“I do not say that I could never be persuaded to sacrifice my reputation to passion- only that it would take a great deal.”

“If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.”

“She sincerely wishes success, for her new life, and intends that no failure of effort, temper, or spirits on her part will jeopardise it.”

“A girl should set her sights on a man who has money; or if not, who can expect to come into money; or if not, who has moneyed connections.”

“A happy marriage- a love match- is something overwhelming, and overpowering.”

“Without money and without connections- I have failed you!”

“Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can’t think why or where she would run to.”

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”

“But we disposable women have to be realistic in this life, you know. Else we get itchy and discontented and start contemplating the kitchen knife and wondering whether it wouldn't look nicer between someone's shoulder-blades.”

“And what does she mean by love, anyway? People use that word and mean all sorts of things by it.”

“So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far away.Bearing up, then, must be this: the feeling of perfect frozen stillness, so that to raise your hand was a wrenching and unnatural event. It was not being able to sleep or eat, and the small placid tone in which she heard herself decline the food. It was the presentiment that there must be a crack or a hole somewhere at hand down which she was to throw and extinguish herself, since there must surely be something provided to make this bearable.”