Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
By the time Mary began writing Frankenstein, she had already become a mother and lost a child. Little Clara arrived two months early in February 1815, only to die two weeks later, to Mary’s harrowing sorrow. Mary wrote later of a “waking dream” that inspired Frankenstein in which she managed to revive baby Clara by moving her closer to the fire and
... See moreMary Shelley • Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (The MIT Press)
some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely
... See moreRosemary Ashton • Middlemarch
it was only Melissa who ate the granola and he was thinking very hard about which granola to buy, the orange and cranberry or the coconut and tropical fruit.
Diana Evans • Ordinary People: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019
Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy
... See moreSarah Perry • Enlightenment
That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned
... See moreSarah Perry • Enlightenment
“Some girls had a fear of the dark and being out alone, but Mary wasn’t one of those. She had long red hair and a wide mouth and an especially curious nature. She was a voracious reader and secretly borrowed her father’s books, even the ones about anatomy. She was bright enough to have frightened her mother with her ideas. On more than one
... See moreGrace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.