“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.”

— Robert Southey

Letter to Charlotte Brontë in March 1837, reported in Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. I (1857), p. 139, and in Mumby Letters of Literary Men, Vol. II (1906), p. 185.

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Robert Southey 51

British poet 1774–1843

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“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.”

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