Date: 1785

"Unwelcome is the first bright dawn of light / To the dark soul; impatient, she rejects, / And fain would push the heavenly stranger back; / She loathes the cranny which admits the day; / Confused, afraid of the intruding guest; / Disturbed, unwilling to receive the beam, / Which to herself her n...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1788

"Such a crowd of thoughts all at once rushed into Mary's mind, that she in vain attempted to express the sentiments which were most predominant."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"Her heart longed to receive a new guest; there was a void in it: accustomed to have some one to love, she was alone, and comfortless, if not engrossed by a particular affection."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"Oh! reason, thou boasted guide, why desert me, like the world, when I most need thy assistance!"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"she hoped that absence and reflection, together with the conviction of it's being hopeless, would conquer this infant passion before it could gather strength wholly to ruin his repose."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1789

"I bid the traitor Love, adieu! / Who to this fond, believing bosom came, / A guest insidious and untrue, / With Pity's soothing voice--in Friendship's name."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790

"It was not in the rapid intricacies of execution, that she excelled so much as in that delicacy of taste, and in those enchanting powers of expression, which seem to breathe a soul through the sound, and which take captive the heart of the hearer."

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

Date: 1790

"Deadly ideas crowded upon their imaginations, and inspired a terror which scarcely allowed them to breathe."

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

Date: 1790

"The ideas of the distance which would separate them, of the dangers she was going to encounter, with a train of wild and fearful anticipations, crowded upon her mind, tears sprang in her eyes, and it was with difficulty she avoided betraying her emotions."

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