Women Authors From England

"From an abbess disposed to turn author, we might more reasonably have expected a manual of meditations for the closet, or select rules for making salves, or distilling strong waters. But the diversions of the field were not thought inconsistent with the character of a religious lady of this eminent rank, who resembled an abbot in respect of exercising an extensive manorial jurisdiction, and who hawked and hunted in common with other ladies of distinction...The second of these treatises is written in rhyme. It is spoken in her own person; in which, being otherwise a woman of authority, she assumes the title of dame. I suspect the whole to be a translation from the French and Latin...The barbarism of the times strongly appears in the indelicate expressions which she often uses; and which are equally incompatible with her sex and profession."

"Ideally, should be approached from the heights of Whitcliffe Common for views of its and the among the cluttered roofs and chimneys, the rosy-pink bricks, the half-timbered houses and somber gray stone of the ancient town walls. The circling the town is spanned by the medieval and Dinham bridges — the latter immortalized in paintings by . From where I live, beside the renovated 12th-century chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a gnarled magnolia tree, I cross Dinham Bridge to wander alongside water meadows of s, , and grazing cattle. Swans glide on the river, the water roars and tumbles over the weir, and the mercurial flight of a appears like a hallucination."

"Where so ever ye fare by fryth or by fell: My dere chylde take hede how Trystam doo you tell. How many manere bestys of venery there were: Lysten to your dame and she shall you lere. Four manere of bestis of venere there are: The fyrste of theym is the harte: the seconde is the hare: The boore is one of tho: the wulfe and not one mo."

"And where that ye come in playne or in place: I shall you tell whyche ben bestys of en chace: One of theym is the bucke: a nother is the doo: The foxe and the marteron: and the wylde roo: And ye shall my dere chylde other bestys all: Where so ye theym fynde Rascall ye shall them call."

"Living in after we married, where we had a small farm with neither nor and where each spring a stallion bedecked with ribbons walked the lanes servicing the mares, we often made the journey between the country and London, a slow and un-trafficky journey through the before the age of motorways."

"A faythfulle frende wold I fayne finde, To fynde hym there he myghte be founde; But now is the worlde wext so unkynde, Yet frenship is fall to the grounde; (Now a frende I have founde) That I woll nother banne ne curse, But of all frendes in felde or towne, Ever, gramercy, myn own purse."

"More rich, more noble I will ever hold The Muse's laurel, than a crown of gold."

"I willingly accept Cassandra's fate, To speak the truth, although believ'd too late."

"Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses."

"As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking."

"Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined."

"There is something about the big, stately house, where the Immortal One had received all the minor Olympians, or their homage, which makes one feel why that grandson gradually left it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweethearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a garment of sooty dust), which seem in some hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, portrayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through every variety of Goethe travelling through life with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as background, to Goethe in all the different forbiddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not enough, alas I for the sycophancies of Eckermann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who sends him a copy of verses and (of all embarrassing untidy presents) a long tail of "a woman's hair." (Faugh!) There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds: a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity."

"There is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much."

"Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life. But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been."

"Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal’s trainbearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four candles made of dead men’s fat, and perform certain rites about which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men’s fat for the candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish. “If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, “the Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages ago—eh!”"

"Having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma."

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as if it required some to complete it." "I hope not," answered Oke, gravely. His gravity made me smile. "Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked. "If there are such things as ghosts," he replied," I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment."

"Why, yes, of course I wrote all the Arab of Mesopotamia. I've loved the reviews which speak of the practical men who were the anonymous authors, etc. It's fun being practical men, isn't it."

"This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration."

"Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart."

"The idea of the court sustained Richard, and he sustained it, at vast expense. He surrounded himself with courtiers who stood to gain from his largesse, and who therefore flattered and praised him as he wished. He experienced his court – his day-to-day life of hunting, or feasting, or games – as the place where the king’s will was enacted without question, and he believed that this was as it should be. But beyond his court circle all was very different, in ways which Richard seems not to have understood."

"Richard understood his own reign through the distorting lens of the court he made for himself; he could not understand why the regality he regarded as his right was denied to him on the broader stage."

"Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires."

"The Londoners’ faithful love and their money were both important to Richard; unfortunately he sought the latter at the expense of the former, while imagining them to be the same thing."

"Here and throughout the reign, the tendency was to focus criticism on particular individuals charged with corruption, rather than to address the structures which made such corruption endemic."

"Richard’s difficulties were many, but the essence of his personal feelings seems to have lain in the confluence of these two great ideas – the divinity of kingship and the perfection of peace – because for Richard, ‘peace’ in the sense that he valued it meant the complete obedience of every subject to the will of the king."

"The long story of the medieval cult of chivalry, from its emergence in the twelfth century to its belated glories in the court of the young Henry VIII, is punctuated by the ongoing conflict between knighthood’s idealistic claims to virtue and divine favour, and the Church’s condemnation of all chivalric values as empty and worthless."

"This kind of moral analysis is characteristic of medieval thought: the aim is to condemn where condemnation is due, but to salvage from the criticism the ideals which animate and support society."

"As we approach him through contemporary records and chronicles, any sense of the real man beneath the image recedes, never to be caught. Chroniclers tell us what they think he said or did, or that bias or rumour believed he had done or said – and even then they give us a Richard who baffled those around him. But the idea of Richard II is as real an object of historical study as the man himself. When it comes to trying to understand the fate of a king, the idea of him may be the only real object of study there is."

"It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither."

"Being thought to be untrustworthy is no better – indeed in political terms much worse – than actually being untrustworthy."

"The government’s reassertion of control over England in the aftermath demonstrated a merciless insistence on the social structure, which tied all into the hierarchy, supporting the king at the top. It was part of Richard’s failure that he did not understand, or would not accept, his throne’s dependence on the stability of that structure."

"The court was by definition in place of extreme instability, of faction and favourites, in which men could rise and fall as they pleased or displeased of the king. For the nation to function at large, this could not be the case. The noble men of the realm needed the security of their patrimony, their status and their rights; for them to support the king they needed to know that he would support the social structure which maintained them all. Richard had demonstrated, fatally, that everything was personal to him."

"Widely read in alchemical writings, a regular pilgrim since 1971 to the lamas in exile from Tibet, analysed by followers of Jung, and loyal to a fierce and personal brand of feminist idealism, Leonora Carrington never altogether sheds in her quest for wisdom a wonderful, saving mischievousness. Her great friend and collector Edward James wrote over her door in Mexico, "This is the house of the Sphinx." A sphinx, yes, but a sphinx who sets riddles not to confound or mock but to provoke laughter and open doors in the chambers of the mind, where love and fear and the other passions have their seat. She has said, "I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind": in many ways she is breaking spells which blind others' sight too, although the landscape she travels remains a place enchanted."

"There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art. (2009)"

"Typically, young women of her class were expected to marry someone rich and titled, but she rebelled almost from childhood...She was a wonderful mother to those children and a treasure for Mexico and for me...She made a decision to live her own life and not the life that was expected of her. Or perhaps she followed a vocation more than she made a decision. I am filled with admiration for her integrity—defending it against the rules of a social class that prevented gifted people from becoming all that they had in them to become. Carrington never gave in...She defended her integrity from the beginning of her life in a very blunt way"

"I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. (August 24, 1943)"

"Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole…The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge. (from first page)"

"“...I believe in inspiration, an inspired conversation between two people with some mysterious affinity can bring more joy into life than even the most expensive kind of clock. Unfortunately there are very few inspired people and one has to fall back on one’s own store of vital fire, this is most exhausting especially, as you know, I have to work day and night even if all my bones ache and my head is swimming and I am fainting with fatigue and nobody understands my mortal fight to keep on my feet and not to lose my inspired joy of life even if I do have palpitations of the heart and they drive me like a poor beast of burden I often feel like Joan of Arc so dreadfully misunderstood and all those terrible cardinals and bishops prodding her poor agonized mind with so many unnecessary questions. I can’t help feeling some deep affinity with Joan of Arc and I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being like myself.” (p25)"

"Strange how the bible always seems to end up in misery and cataclysm. I often wondered how their angry and vicious God became so popular. Humanity is very strange and I don’t pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything? (p20)"

"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them. (p21)"

"When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. (first line)"

"Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. (p13)"

""I am never lonely...Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people. Of course I never hope that you will understand me, so all I ask is that you do not imagine that you are persuading me into something when you are actually forcing me against my will." (p18)"

"When I walk in a room, I think people think, Oh, shit. It's Annabelle."

"He was my brother, my boyfriend, my soulmate. Most of the time people called me Mrs McQueen. Quite often we were sharing a bed. The truth is I was happier with Lee than with anyone else. He asked me to marry him towards the end and I said no. I wish now that I had said yes."

"Friendship exists only when there is truth and loyalty."

"Annabelle was always slightly a tortured soul, Actually, if I really think back to it, the show was not the right platform for someone like Annabelle, Although you want people who have explosive personalities who maybe cope with life differently, you also don't really want to have people who can't cope with life. She didn't have a coping mechanism when we would all have to talk behind her back, she didn't understand it because she was always the cool girl at school. So something like this was very negative for her and such a very, very negative experience. She couldn't say in her head, 'It's a TV show, It's a TV show.' It's incredibly hard. Somebody like me who went to boarding school and can block stuff out, not deal with my emotions — she could not do that. This was just not a great platform for her."

"These rugged walls less grievous are to me, Than those bedeck'd with curious arras be T'a guilty conscience; to a wounded heart, A palace cannot palliate that smart: Tho' drunk with pleasure, dull with opiates, Some seem as senseless of their sad estates, Till on their dying-beds conscience awakes. But tho' the righteous be in bonds confin'd, They inwardly sweet satisfaction find."

"How sweet is harmless solitude! What can its joys control? Tumults and noise may not intrude, To interrupt the soul."