Date: 1788

"I continued it from habit, and because I knew not how to employ my time otherwise; but I felt a dreary vacuity in my heart; and amid splendor and admiration was unhappy."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1788

"Tho' Godolphin had one of the best tempers in the world--a temper which the roughness of those among whom he lived had only served to soften and humanize, and which was immovable by the usual accidents that ruffle others, yet he had also in a great excess all those keen feelings, which fill a he...

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1788

"But in pouring her sorrows into the bosom of her friend she appeared to find great consolation."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: December 1790

"The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they imbibed whilst their hands were employed; they cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1794

"The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within."

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

Date: 1797

"'If you are under any promise of secresy,' interrupted Vivaldi, 'I forbid you to tell this wonderful tale, which, however, seems somewhat too big to rest within your brain.'"

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

Date: 1797

"Having said this, I am prepared to meet whatever suffering you shall inflict upon me; but be assured, that my own voice never shall sanction the evils to which I may be subjected, and that the immortal love of justice, which fills all my heart, will sustain my courage no less powerfully than the...

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

Date: 1799

"Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among / Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb / Of deep philosophy, and museful sits, / In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, / Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft / The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, / With moonbeam rainbows ti...

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1818

"Catherine's mind was too full, as she entered the house, for her either to observe or to say a great deal; and, till called on by the General for her opinion of it, she had very little idea of the room in which she was sitting."

— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)

Date: 1860

"She kissed him, then seated herself again, and took another table cloth on her lap, unfolding it a little way to look at the pattern, while the children stood by in mute wretchedness - their minds quite filled for the moment with the words 'beggars' and 'workhouse.'"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)