Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.

...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.