As she [Margaret Oliphant] argues in a piece on the art of autobiography (...), those who had kept themselves intact had intense personal memories, were emotionally single-minded. But the woman who has married and has children finds her experience overtaken, confused, and yet also made dense by the sucessive variety of claims, the unceasing busyness of a life which is no longer simply one's own. Perhaps, Mrs. Oliphant tried to persuaded herself, that was why Charlotte Brontë's work seemed much more powerful than her own: it had the intense yearning and frustration of the single woman, on the verge of fantasy. And yet, she added, "I have had far more experience and, I think, a fuller conception of life." (Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 245)