I have been reading Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, which is sort of interesting. It's an industrial novel, a subset of the social novel, of which there are relatively few. Mind you, it has a lot about clergymen, and now it is morphing into feminism. This bit seems to be Charlotte Brontë speaking. It reminded me Jane's feminist speech in Jane Eyre (not that I don't sympathise). I snorted out loud when I read it. Who could she be thinking of?
'If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad women almost a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem – novel – drama, thinking it divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial – false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on the point; if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour'
'Shirley, you chatter so, I can't fasten you: be still. And after all, authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes.'
'Not at all: women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted: it will be “declined with thanks,” and left for me at the publisher's'.