Best Of Samantha Ellis' "Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis
When Helen flees her marriage, she has to make a woman of herself. She moves into Wildfell Hall, which is half in ruins, like her life. She swaps her hateful married surname for her mother’s maiden name, and the ostentatious clothes her husband liked in favour of the ‘plain, dark, sober’ clothes she likes. This is useful, too, because in these dark clothes she can disguise herself as a widow. She is killing off her husband in her mind. She is remembering who she was before she married him. Knowing this day would come, she’s secretly taught herself to paint. She finds a dealer in London, adopts another pseudonym and starts turning out commercial landscapes. She works out how to evade the village’s prying gossips.
p. 9
[Virginia] Woolf said that after writing [To the Lighthouse] she finally stopped seeing her mother’s ghost.
p.21
If you don’t like the rules of the world you live in, sometimes you have to break them, and fantasy fiction – alternative universes, utopias and dystopias, science fiction, steampunk, paranormal stories, sword and sorcery epics and the rest – breaks the rules of everyday life. It can be freeing. It can make you feel nothing is sacred, anything can happen, everything can change.
p.93
A space for oneself is a bit like a room of one’s own, and maybe instead of physical space, some women need anonymity, androgyny and peace.
p.275
As for the question Anne articulated for me, ‘What, Where, and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’, I have been trying. Though she no longer appears in my dreams, I have been trying to grasp the thorn. To find my narrow way and stick to it. To write a new story when I don’t like the one I’m given. To expand my heart. To take courage.
p.319
