“Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. I speak from experience and from the opportunity I have had of much observation in such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind would feel under similar fancies.”

Hard-won counsel drawn from her own experience of mental illness · Letter to Sarah Stoddart concerning her mother’s illness

• Compassion
• Experience
• Madness

“You would like to see us, as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while.”

Affectionate portrait of collaborative domestic literary life with her brother · Letter to Sarah Stoddart, June 1806

• Companionship
• Family
• Writing

“I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother’s wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you, and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people’s real characters and never expecting them to act out of it.”

On accepting others as they are rather than expecting them to mirror oneself · Letter to Sarah Stoddart, c. 1805–6

• Acceptance
• Character
• Relationships