Sublime

Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before. The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind.

When she was twenty Brontë received a letter from poet laureate Robert Southey saying ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life & it ought not to be.’

Her oldest son, Frederick, put on a uniform and went off to fight. Impatient with Lincoln for not announcing emancipation right away, she went down to Washington when he finally proclaimed that the slaves would be free, and was received privately in the White House. The scene is part of our folklore. “So this is the little woman who made this big w

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 insignifican

the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid