The Brontë Sisters’ Best Lines: Charlotte, Emily and Anne

The best Brontë sisters quotes do not sound like one family. Charlotte argues, Emily storms and Anne reports, coolly, things her readers did not want to hear. Below are thirteen lines from Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, each copied from the full text, with the chapter and the scene around it.

All three first published as men, or at least as names that let readers assume so: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The prefaces they wrote under those names are worth reading too, and two of them appear below.

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre and Villette

1. Women feel just as men feel

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do

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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter XII

Jane has climbed to the leads of Thornfield to look out over the fields, then walks the corridor of the third storey, restless. The argument comes out of boredom, not a lecture hall, which is why it persuades. A few lines later she hears Grace Poole’s laugh, and the novel’s real secret is in the house the whole time she is talking about confinement.

2. Poor, obscure, plain, and little

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart!

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter XXIII

Rochester has been teasing Jane in the orchard at Thornfield about his supposed marriage to Miss Ingram, and she believes him. The four adjectives are a list of everything the world uses against her, delivered in one breath and thrown back. The next sentence is better still: if God had given her beauty and wealth, she would have made it as hard for him to leave her as it is for her to leave him.

3. No bird

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter XXIII

Same scene, a minute later. Rochester has just compared her to a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation, and she refuses the image outright. It is a rare moment of a heroine correcting the hero’s metaphor in real time, and she physically breaks free as she says it.

4. Reader, I married him

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter XXXVIII, “Conclusion”

The grammar is the point: I married him, not the other way round. After four hundred pages of other people deciding her fate, Jane takes the active verb. The wedding is then dismissed in a sentence, as if to say the ceremony was never the interesting part.

5. Lucy Snowe, not imaginative

I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination

Charlotte Brontë, Villette, chapter II, “Paulina”

Lucy is watching the homesick child Paulina and insists she is not the fanciful type, then in the same sentence says the room the girl sits in seemed not inhabited, but haunted. That is Villette in miniature: a narrator who tells you she is reliable and then hides things from you for chapters.

6. Here pause

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette, chapter XLII, “Finis”

The ending refuses to say whether Paul Emanuel survives the storm at sea. Readers who want a happy ending are told they may imagine one; everyone else understands. It is one of the most deliberate non-endings in Victorian fiction, and the tone, almost polite, makes it colder.

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

The novel’s most quoted lines, including the ghost at the window and Whatever our souls are made of, are covered in our piece on Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. These three are from elsewhere in the book.

7. Dirty on purpose

“You needn’t have touched me!” he answered, following her eye and snatching away his hand. “I shall be as dirty as I please: and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty.”

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Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter VII

Catherine has come back from five weeks at Thrushcross Grange as a young lady, and the first thing she notices about Heathcliff is his grime. His answer is a child’s tantrum and a declaration of class war at once. Nelly then scrubs him up for Christmas, which ends with Heathcliff throwing a tureen of hot apple sauce at Edgar Linton.

8. I am Heathcliff

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter IX

The phrase people forget is a source of little visible delight. Catherine is not describing a pleasant love; she is describing bedrock. She says all this to Nelly while planning to marry Linton anyway, and Heathcliff, who has overheard only the earlier part about it degrading her to marry him, has already left.

9. I cannot live without my soul

I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter XVI

Catherine has died, and Heathcliff, when Nelly goes out to tell him, prays that she will not rest while he lives and begs her to haunt him. Then he dashes his head against a tree trunk. Brontë does not let this be beautiful: Nelly describes him howling not like a man, but like a savage beast, and she notices splashes of blood on the bark.

Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

10. True histories

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey, chapter I, “The Parsonage”

The first sentence of Anne’s first novel undercuts its own moral before the story begins. It is dry, funny and unusually honest for a book about a clergyman’s daughter going out as a governess, and it sets up a narrator who never inflates her own experience.

11. The stone

With fiendish glee he commenced a list of torments; and while he was busied in the relation, I dropped the stone upon his intended victims and crushed them flat beneath it.

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey, chapter V

Her pupil Tom has been given a brood of nestlings by his uncle and plans to torture them. Agnes, with no authority to stop him, kills the birds herself with a flat stone the gardener had set up as a mouse-trap. It is the most startling act in any Brontë novel. The uncle only laughs and promises Tom another brood tomorrow, and Agnes answers, If you do, Mr. Robson, I shall kill them too.

12. Sons and daughters

You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others.

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, chapter III

Helen Graham, the new tenant, is being lectured about how to raise her little boy, and she turns the argument round until Gilbert, the narrator, has to interrupt her. The line is an early clue to her past: she knows exactly what a man raised on experience turns into.

13. A book for both

All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

Anne Brontë, preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, dated July 22nd, 1848

Some critics had accused her of a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal. In this preface Anne says she wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it, and insists that Acton Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis Bell. Charlotte had made a similar point in a note to the third edition of Jane Eyre, dated April 13th, 1848: her claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone.

Quick reference: Brontë quotes by book and chapter

For more Brontë lines on being alone, including Jane’s The more solitary, the more friendless, see book quotes about solitude; her happy afternoon with Bewick’s birds is in quotes about reading. Their great contemporary in London is collected in Charles Dickens quotes.

One detail from the Project Gutenberg edition of Wildfell Hall: its contents page keeps the original chapter titles from the first printed edition of 1848, titles that were removed in later one-volume editions after Anne’s death in 1849.

Sources

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Project Gutenberg eBook #1260: gutenberg.org/ebooks/1260
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette, Project Gutenberg eBook #9182: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9182
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Project Gutenberg eBook #768: gutenberg.org/ebooks/768
• Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey, Project Gutenberg eBook #767: gutenberg.org/ebooks/767
• Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with an introduction by Mrs Humphry Ward, Project Gutenberg eBook #969: gutenberg.org/ebooks/969