Je est un autre.

“We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.”

“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.”

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.

“As a child she was described as having the eyes of a half-tamed creature, being drawn to the unnatural, with a penchant for improvising tempestuous fairy stories.”

How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

There shall be poets! When woman’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man - hitherto detestable - having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! […] She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.

Crimson Peak, and Edith herself, originate from books. Books, in particular, written by women. Young women. Girls, almost – girls like Edith. Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Daphne Du Maurier, and of course the Bronte sisters; Gothic romance has, since its conception, been the arena of female imagination. Of course men have written in the Gothic mode, but they tend to write a different type. In fact, scholars of the genre consider the line between Gothic romance and Gothic horror to be a gendered one. Where women tend to write stories of social oppression and interpersonal horror, men write ones where the supernatural is actually real, and actually the sinister force at work. There are many theories as to why this is the case. I favour a simple one: women have long had a great deal of very real things to fear; they do not need to make up ghosts and monsters to menace them.