And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men content for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?
O sir, she smiled, no doubt,
When'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave command;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive...(43-46)
Jeanette Winterson's The Passion
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...
"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden
Your young life like mine be wasted...
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Name the author and the text.
Charles Dickens's Hard Times
Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South
Also, acceptable: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for its social realism