Status Updates From The World Within: The Bront...

Charlotte Bronte about her siblings:

‘One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm - and closed their glazed eyes - I have seen them buried one by one - and thus far - God has upheld me. From my heart I thank him.’

Emily was ‘self-sufficient and silent, she had a need for solitude and the wild moors that was overwhelming.’

Charlotte on trying to conform:
‘I have endeavoured…to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil but to feel deeply interested in them I don’t always succeed, for sometimes I would rather be reading or writing…’

Charlotte was told ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life’

Emily’s friend Ellen Nussey on watching her observe tadpoles:
‘nature’s simplest offerings were fountains of pleasure and enjoyment.’

“Charlotte drew an implicit contrast between her writing and that of Jane Austen on reading Emma in 1850:

‘Her business is not so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet… the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death - this Miss Austen ignores…’ “