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!"
preview | full record— 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?"
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)
Date: w. 1782, 1786, 1816
"In the first ebullition of his fury, Vathek had resolved to rip open the body of Alboufaki and to stuff it with those of the negresses and of Carathis herself, but the remembrance of the Giaour, the palace of Istakar, the sabres, and the talismans, flashing before his imagination, with the simul...
preview | full record— Beckford, William (1760-1844)
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...
preview | full record— 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!"
preview | full record— 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.'
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)