More than fifty-five years after her stay at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, Laetitia Wheelwright wrote to a biographer of Charlotte Brontë:
I am afraid my recollections of Emily Brontë will not aid you much. I simply disliked her from the first, her tallish ungainly ill-dressed figure contrasting so strangely with Charlotte’s small, neat trim person, although their dresses were alike; always answering our jokes with ‘I wish to be as God made me.’
I thought of this passage:
The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear… “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way.”
From A Temple of the Holy Ghost by Flannery O’Connor, in the story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955).