“While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.”

“Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.”

“I'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?”

“I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these...”

“In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parent...”

“Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.”

“Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.”

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them b...”

“I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.”

“There seemed to be endless obstacles preventing me from living with my eyes open, but as I gradually followed up clue after clue it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.”

“Is something the matter? Calcifer asked. Yes. My heart. There was a scarecrow at the door! Sophie gasped. What has a scarecrow to do with your heart? Calcifer asked. It was trying to get in here. I...”

“The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep,...”

“Without work, we die daily.”

“In suffering a man must search for his Maker.”

“Live daringly.”