Margaret Leigh

the acts which he had washed and diluted with inward argument and motive,

But there were various subjects that Dorothea was trying to get clear upon, and she resolved to throw herself energetically into the gravest of all. She sat down in the library before her particular little heap of books on political economy and kindred matters, out of which she was trying to get light as to the best way of spending money so as not

If Dorothea, after her night’s anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond – why, she perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those three who were on one hearth in Lydgate’s house at half-past seven that evening.

The Rubicon, we know, was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay entirely in certain invisible conditions.

Mr Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation. When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavour by mixing.

Until that wretched yesterday – except the moment of vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same presence – all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered. But now – would Dorothea meet him in that world a

In Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve, which looks at classic literature through data, Ben Blatt conducts his own version of the Bechdel Test: if a novel describes male actions three times as much as female actions, it doesn’t pass. The answer, which will surprise no one, is that almost everything apart from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fails. He a

Charlotte Brontë explained the decision to use male names: ‘We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.’

‘There had been many years of his life when he was a tall, good-looking man, no gut, strolling about the campus at Harvard, and people did look at him then, for all those years, he would see students glance at him with deference, and also women, they looked at him.’