Women Authors From England

"The subject of love is always of the most absorbing interest to the younger and more active portion of a people; sexual passion, in its ennobling or debasing form, exercises irresistible attraction."

"If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some way of realising it. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed great attraction for me."

"Another way in which professionalization worked to the detriment of women can be seen in the cases of Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Marie Zakrzewska, and Ann Preston, who despite their M.D.s and excellent training were denied access to hospitals, were refused recognition by county medical societies, and were denied customary referrals by male colleagues. Their experiences were similar to those of most of the pioneer women physicians."

"The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women."

"Every physician knows the numerous sources of error that may lead an able advocate to wrong conclusions. The difficult art of statistics, which is no simple arrangement of numbers, but often requires very elaborate calculations, may lend itself to error; the neglect of some facts, or the undue prominence of others, the comparison of dissimilar conditions, or observations made on too short a scale or for too short a period—all these various conditions must be considered as sources of possible error."

"In carrying on the grand work of improving national health, extirpating loathsome disease, discovering and removing the causes of disease, the distinction must be carefully drawn between the object to be accomplished and the means by which it shall be attained. The object is a grand one; the method of accomplishing it must be equally so, i.e., it must be guided by moral principle."

"The great importance to the nation of the prevalence of a high standard of morality in the body of the Medical Profession is evident from the confidential character of the services they are called on to perform. Very few are investigators or experimenters. The great majority become the trusted friends of the family in its time of greatest weakness and need."

"For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women."

"The people of Henderson were all very friendly to me personally, and my relations always pleasant with them; but the injustice of the state of society made a gradually deepening impression on my mind. The inhabitants lived in constant fear of an outbreak among the slaves. Women did not dare to walk in the pleasant woods and country around the village, for terror of runaway slaves. Painful social contrasts constantly forced themselves on my notice."

"In 1845 when I resolved to become a physician, six eminent physicians, in different parts of the country were written to, for advice. They all united in dissuading me, stating, "That it was an utter impossibility for a woman to obtain a medical education; that the idea though good in itself, was eccentric and utopian, utter impracticable!" It was only by long-continued searching through all the colleges of the country, that one was at last found willing to grant admission. When I entered college in 1847, the ladies of the town pronounced the undertaking crazy, or worse and declared that they would die rather than employ a woman as a physician. In 1852, when establishing myself in New York there was the utmost difficulty in finding a boarding house where the simple name, as a physician could be placed; ladies would not reside in a house so marked, and expressed the greatest astonishment that it should be allowed in a respectable establishment."

"It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.' But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book. ... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust."

"History is so important. It explores and tells us who we are. We should be doing more of it as a country, not less."

"I've heard people say, ‘Well, history is protected at the top Russell Group universities’. But that is a really dangerous route to go down. Are we saying that if people don’t get 3As, they don’t deserve to do history? It should be a degree that is open to all, and that means it must be available to those who want to study locally. Otherwise we might as well be going back to the Victorian period when this sort of university education was only for elite men."

"In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other."

"Large families were really in fashion [in Victorian England], they were seen as a status symbol, they were seen as an example of how the man was very virile. The reality was that, like Victoria, people were pregnant repeatedly. Every three months or so they might fall pregnant, so the average woman was pretty much pregnant or about to be pregnant for most of her early married life."

"A country with a sense of purpose should encourage free speech and debate, but instead we have a Conservative whip on a strange mission to audit university teaching on Brexit. Pretty McCarthyite. And on the other side, confusion about who should and shouldn't be allowed to speak. We should nurture great minds of the future, not tunnel their vision."

"We have some of the greatest photographs of all time cemented in our [the United Kingdom's] national identity, but we don't have the whole picture. Our understanding of history and the country is shaped by the images the survive."

"We landed at the Ferry House, and struck off into the woods full of globe flowers by the lake side, and of yellow poppies by the wood wall; of hyacinths beneath the trees; of the curved crozier heads of the sprouting bracken; of young foxglove spathes, thick, downy, and as yet flowerless; of tufts of mountain fern like Indians' head-dresses; of trailing brambles and yet more delicate sprays of wild-raspberry; of bird's-eye, blue and lustrous, of violets and wood-sorrel; of lady's-mantles, green, gold-spotted; of delicate wind-flowers and starry stitchwort,—full of all manner of sweet wood-flowers; and then, returning, we saw two large carts and two large horses put into the ferry-boat, which a man nearly as large rowed leisurely across, according to the mode and manner of the place."

"In re-reading these pages I am now more than ever convinced that I have struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor retract a line of what I have said."

"In her early writings in the 1840s and 1850s she had been an ardent supporter of women's rights and even free love, and had received particular notoriety with her shocking 1851 novel Realities. In her middle years, however, she modified her radical views, and her novels such as The Rebel of the Family (1880) reflect her growing conservatism and ambivalence about women's rights."

"Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors. I remember meeting someone very grand while I was making the programme who said: "Oh, I see you are going over to the dark side." I have suffered from that thinking, too, that the documents we should be using are from archives and libraries. But you can learn a lot by recreating stuff."

"My main job as a curator is to try to get people interested in history, to visit our palaces, to enjoy themselves, and to learn something, too. I try to do the same with my books, to entertain as well as to inform."

"As we commemorate 75 years since Victory in Europe, we must all remember the brave boys and what they sacrificed for us … they left their families and homes to fight for our freedom, and many lost their lives trying to protect us and our liberties. This year, we must commemorate this special anniversary apart. I hope that VE Day will remind us all that hope remains even in the most difficult of times and that simple acts of bravery and sacrifice still define our nation as the NHS works so hard to care for us. Most of all, I hope today serves as a reminder that however hard things get, we will meet again."

"I am so sad to hear of her passing but at the same time so glad to have met her and experienced first-hand her warm, fun-loving personality. Her voice will sing in my heart forever."

"Although it must be bloody annoying for a writer to have her work reduced to a flip phrase, I have only used it once and in a perfectly respectable context. What happened to the term after that is no more my responsibility than it would be Trollope's if her jokey reference to a certain kind of serious fiction as "grim lit" took hold."

"For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don't want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself [...] A cliche is only a cliche if it's happening in someone else's life."

"Oh I admire untidiness so much. There's something in the emotional carelessness, the freedom of it, that I quietly applaud."

"What I'm trying to do in all these novels is mirror a contemporary preoccupation. I'm not providing any solutions. I'm simply saying: "Can we please get the conversation going?""

"I wanted to write a novel about the sandwich generation: parents falling to pieces at one end of your life and children being quite demanding at the other. You, the woman, are probably working full-time, but society, which is really very old-fashioned, still expects women to do all the caring."

"All the middle-class people I write about would have had nannies and servants in the past, but now we do everything ourselves and children absolutely dominate our lives. It's their demands, their homework, their nightmares, their insistence on staying down, because downstairs is more interesting than upstairs. I don't think children are particularly sweet, but I think they're absolutely fascinating, and I take them as seriously as they take themselves. I don't think they're dear little innocents in this never-never nursery land; I think they're adults in the making, and they suffer great fears and anxieties and pains. And we give them silly food looking like fish and rabbits all cut up tiny, and dress them up in dolly clothes."

"I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual."

"I was born into the Church of England, I'm still in it, and I go to church. It's as natural to me as breathing - you know, God's always been there, he will always be there. I don't talk about it elaborately, and I never will, because I'm not that sort of Englishwoman: I mean, evangelism gives me the horrors."

"[On the Aga saga tag being applied to her novels] It's so inaccurate [...] Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. It's all rather patronising isn't it?"

"[Asked "Why do you write?"] A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story to build up relationships, to shape us. People-watching."

"I've done the countryside for decades. The last dog went to paradise in the summer, dear old boy. So it's just me now. Even if I'm miserable in London, I'm happier miserable. You have to see the countryside on a grey afternoon to really understand what it means to live there. It can be quite alarming."

"In ordinary life [...] if we're in love, we still have to go and see old aunts in nursing homes, take the children to school, and go to Tesco, and it's that juggling act that the 19th-century novelists are jolly good at, but that we have lacked in fiction now for about a generation. [She has set out to] do the things the traditional novel has always done: to mirror reality, explore people's emotional lives, but also to involve a great many other dilemmas. I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback."

"The comparison to Jane Austen makes me fidget. There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into. They are not the same. On a good day, I might be good."

"It was ironic that even my small triumphs were not attributed to me."

"She always taught me, ‘Open your heart when times get tough, accept what happens, live in the moment and reach out to help others as there’s always someone worse off than you’. She believed, rightly, that gives you purpose and helps you heal. So I always do my best to forgive and move forward."

"When you get older, as a leading lady it gets harder…You try not to have someone else upstage or take the shine. When I play character roles I am usually playing people who are slightly over the top, so that goes fine."

"Over the years, I’ve learnt that out of challenge comes opportunity and I know if I hadn’t been tested, I wouldn’t have pushed myself or been able to discover my abilities."

"I was always left out when I was a little girl. I was different from everyone…People were jealous but I didn’t realise. I had a reunion with some school friends recently and they said, 'We were mean to you because you got special attention because you were so beautiful.’ I said, 'I wasn’t beautiful. I was gawky.’ I never ever imagined myself to look nice."

"Many women are asking: why do some women choose to cover their heads? We have to understand this and other questions. This is one of the biggest challenges for feminism today. What is worrying is that when women are divided into categories it is the status quo – the patriarchy – that benefits.…"

"I learned to pay attention to the readers and not to the madness…Because to be a writer in Turkey is a bit like being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other."

"I have met lots of women who have grown up in Turkey who cannot bring themselves to swear in Turkish. But in English they use the F-word all the time. Writing is like that for me."

"It is because of identity politics – we are, sadly, becoming more tribal. The expectation seems to be that a writer from each tribe must tell the story of that tribe. I’m Turkish but also many other things. For me, imagination is a desire to transcend boundaries. When we write, we can be multiple."

"…I think my biggest frustration has been my own constant undermining of my self-belief. You have to be slightly psychopathic to become a writer: it’s like any business, actually. To be successful, you have to have tunnel vision – but as this is totally irrational because you’re focusing all this energy on yourself, you end up questioning your own sanity!"

"… I tried not to dwell on it: sensationalising something like that is simply unacceptable. But it happens in so many families, and it must be faced head on. I was saying, Look: even in these immigrant, hard working, well-respected communities, this happens."

"… I think my attitude has changed – before, I was on my own, trying to break through into the world on the other side of a slippery glass wall. Now I’m on that other side, I feel I have to work harder. And I do. I don’t always love the work I do – but I know I’m one of the luckiest people alive to be doing what I always wanted."

"…I think I was writing from a position of frustration and perhaps anger – about the rise of the far right and the pandering of consecutive governments to the Daily Mail and its equivalents who fulminate about multiculturalism and do not acknowledge the great good that immigration has done. I wanted to rebalance the arguments."