I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors, they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

More from Lives of Girls and Women

• I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
• Accept loss forever
• A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
• A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
• A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. Essays, "Character," 1844
• A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.