"Byron's great star had risen"

frontispiece from a rare copy of Emma, signed from Jane Austen to her best friend, and the inspiration for Mrs. Weston, Anne Sharp

All Sacred Heart convent schools are the same - the same blue serge dresses, usually, with white collars and cuffs, the same blue and green and pink moiré ribbons awarded for good conduct...the same curtsies dipped in the hall, the same early-morning chapel with processions of girls, like widowed queens, in sad black-net veils...the same tiny, old whiskered nun was reading, no doubt from Emma or A Tale of Two Cities to a long table of girls stiching French seams or embroidering bureau scarves with wreaths of flowers. -Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy