Date: 1778, 1779

"The first fortnight that I passed here, was so quiet, so serene, that it gave me reason to expect a settled calm during my stay; but if I may now judge of the time to come, by the present state of my mind, the calm will be succeeded by a storm, of which I dread the violence!"

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1778, 1779

"Yet oh!--shall I not, in this last farewell, which thou wilt not read till every stormy passion is extinct,--and the kind grave has embosomed all my sorrows,--shall I not offer to the man once so dear to me, a ray of consolation to those afflictions he has in reserve?"

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Passion not merely banished his justice, but clouded his reason, and I soon left the room, that at least I might not hear the aspersions he forbid me to answer."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1788

"Mary observed his character, and wrote down a train of reflections, which these observations led her to make; these reflections received a tinge from her mind; the present state of it, was that kind of painful quietness which arises from reason clouded by disgust; she had not yet learned to be r...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

""Ah! will you not there hear me? Will you still inhumanly smile; will you still look so gentle, while your heart is harder than the rocks we shall see--colder than the snow that crowns them!--an heart on which even the pen of fire which Rousseau held would make no impression!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1788

"Frequently, your coldness, your unkindness, gives me again to despondence and every lovely prospect I had suffered my imagination to draw is lost in clouds and darkness.'

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790

"His last words struck with the force of lightning upon the mind of Ferdinand; they seemed to say that his mother might yet exist."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1790

"Suspicion is like a mist, which renders the object it shades so uncertain, that the figure must be finished by imagination; and, when distrust takes the pencil, the strokes are generally so dark, that the disappointed heart sickens at the picture."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1790

"Her mind was in a state of uncontroulable agitation; and, though music has power to sooth a gentle, or even a deep and settled melancholy, the torments of jealousy, the agonies of suspence, raise a tempest in the soul, which no harmony can lull to repose."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1790

"Let those who possess the talents, or the virtues, by which he was distinguished, avoid similar wretchedness, by guarding their minds against the influence of passion; since, if it be once suffered to acquire an undue ascendency over reason, we shall in vain attempt to controul its power: we mig...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)