”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed i”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed in black with silver lace, a crimson plume curled about the broad brim of his hat affording the only touch of colour. Under that hat was the tawny face of Captain Blood.”
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Errol Flynn plays Captain Blood in the 1935 movie version of this book.
Doctor Peter Blood has settled down in Bridgewater to a quiet life of contemplation while tending to his geraniums when he is summoned to help the wounded rebels who have been fighting against the forces of James II. This conflict is called The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which might indicate to you who eventually wins. Peter Blood can’t care one whit about this civil war. He has had his fill of war when he served in France and would find war a frivolous pursuit if it weren’t so deadly.
While helping the rebel wounded, he is captured. Though Blood makes the case that he takes the Hippocratic Oath very seriously, the judge finds that by providing aid and comfort to the enemy much more seriously. He is sentenced to hang. His sentence, along with his fellow “conspirators,” is commuted to transportation to the crown’s plantations in the Caribbean. This isn’t leniency, but purely for financial gain. Why waste so much free labor at the end of a hangman’s rope?
Once in Barbados, Blood proves his worth as a doctor, which gives him more freedom of motion than his fellow slaves. The overseer's daughter, Arabella Bishop, learns of his plight and develops sympathetic feelings towards Blood. He and some of his friends escape the island and fall in with pirates. Blood is an intelligent man, and it doesn’t take long for his pirate brethren to discover his value as a tactician and learn to respect his courage. He is soon elevated to the captaincy, and thus begins the bloody reign of Captain Blood, held only in check by his own adherence to a conscience.
There are battles in this book described so vividly by Rafael Sabatini that they give me chills, but the moment where I felt that thrill in my stomach that sent a harpoon from my current self back to my ten year old reading self was this one.
”Levasseur, his hand on his sword, his face a white mask of rage, was confronting Captain Blood to hinder his departure.
‘You do not take her while I live!’ he cried.
‘Then I’ll take her when you’re dead,’ said Captain Blood, and his own blade flashed in the sunlight.”
Isn’t Levasseur a great name? There is also Cahusac, Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, Pitt, and one of Blood’s most ruthless enemies, Don Miguel de Espinosa. I love this line to describe Wolverstone: ”There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.” Wolverstone is a storyteller, and Sabatini with that line also alludes to one of his own best qualities as a writer. He knows how to tell a story.
There is this great conversation at the beginning of the book The Club Dumas when two booksellers are discussing their favorite Sabatini book, and Lucas Corso declares his preference for Captain Blood. These are seemingly throwaway pieces of dialogue that probably don’t resonate with most readers, but it is the author speaking to a certain type of reader. Perez-Reverte is reassuring me that I am going to enjoy this book. The movie Ninth Gate is based on that book. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you really should.
This book is probably most famous for inspiring the 1935 movie starring Errol Flynn and directed by the Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Sabatini helped with the screenplay. I’ve not seen the movie in decades, but now that I’ve read the book, I certainly want to watch it again.
There is romance in this book as Peter Blood tries to win his way back to respectability so he could dare to hope to one day win the hand of Arabella Bishop. There ”’I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintance, Captain Blood’, said she.” It’s a dagger through the heart and I want to yell, Should he have stayed a slave? There are so many missed opportunities for them to reconcile as each misinterprets the other’s true intentions. The plot device of win the girl, lose the girl, and hopefully win her back is definitely in play. There are several moments when it feels all is lost, but the hardest moment is when Blood himself begins to believe that he can’t win. We’ve seen him overcome so much that we can’t hardly stand to see him so low.
I recently read Michael Dirda’s book Browsings, and he reminded me of how much I enjoy reading the books from the age of storytelling that spanned from the late 19th century and into the early 20th century. One of the many books he mentions in Captain Blood (1922), and I’m nearly tearing my hair out at the thought that I’ve never read it. How is this possible? Treasure Island, a book filled with pirates, was the book that made me a lifelong reader. I would have snapped up a copy of this book as a preteen and would have probably read it twice back to back, as I tended to do in those days with a book I really enjoyed. All's right with the world: I’ve finally read Captain Blood, and I fully intend to read other Sabatini books as well.
So there is some purple prose, with the best example being the use of the word empurpled. I found myself smiling as it continued to show up in the text. Sabatini didn’t have a computer program to tell him how often he used or overused a word. Another is irradiate, which had my modern brain thinking of nuclear exposure, but, of course, in those days the word was used differently. "Sunlight streamed down through stained glass, irradiating the faces of family and friends." I must say, though, that I now have a hankering to use empurpled in something I’m writing. Of course, it is one of those words that gives an editor a chubby as they slash it from your text. The audacity of this Keeten fellow to use a word like that!
This book stirred up a lot of memories for me of those many wonderful moments in my childhood when a book, like a tornado, swept me up and gave me dreams of an expansive, exciting life.
”Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natura”Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for it they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.”
To think of this long essay as feminist propaganda is to do this book and the author Virginia Woolf a disservice. Desmond MacCarthy of the Sunday Times labels the book as such, but he also says, ”yet it resembles an almond tree in blossom.” Certainly, the case can be made that MacCarthy feels a niggling of perception that the book is more than just propaganda, quite possibly something beautiful. Vincent Van Gogh certainly found blossoming almond trees to be beautiful, given the number of times he painted them. Woolf liked the review and even pasted it in her scrapbook.
The expectation I had in reading this book, as I do with every Woolf book I decide to read, is that she will change my perspective or, at the very least, slightly alter my life view about something. We can all agree a pail is a pail, but if it is turned upside down, is it still a pail or does it become something else? Woolf turns ideas sideways, or tosses them up in the air so they spin around and around, or sometimes moves the reader from one vantage point to another. See this thought from down here and now from up there. It will look different. Understanding comes from expanding the mind, and presenting tired arguments with fresh insight is important.
If we return to the opening quote that began this “review,” we can read that as an act of oppression of women being relegated to this role, or we can read it as a grand sacrifice for the greater good. If women had never been subservient to men, then civilisation as we know it would not exist. If women were as strong physically as men and did not need a man’s protection, how different would things be? Has nature intentionally hampered women to create the proper dynamic for the human species to evolve into civilised creatures? Regardless of any type of grand design, we can say now that most of us do live in a civilized world and that the days of women needing to be looking-glasses is over. I believe that women are quite capable of molding the world to fit their needs without waiting for a man to do it for them.
Suffragettes worked for many decades to achieve the vote. In Britain, they had that right given to them in 1918 and in the United States in 1920. Virginia Woolf emphatically says that getting the right to vote was secondary to her receiving an inheritance of 500 pounds a year from her aunt. The right to vote did not give her power over her own life, but having her own money did. She could afford a room of her own, and she could afford to be a serious writer. Of course, financial independence is important, but I’d never really thought about it carrying more weight than having the right to vote. We may have seen this play out in the 2016 election when 47% of white women voted for Trump and 45% voted for Clinton. One would think that Clinton would offer these women more future advantages, but when thinking about at least the immediate future, these women who supported Trump must have felt that he offered more opportunity for a robust economy.
Discounting the one issue voters who have routinely voted against their best interests for decades in the hopes of overturning Roe vs. Wade, any reasonable projection would have expected more white women to vote for Clinton. I’ve believed for a long time that women could easily control the politics of this country as they did in the 2018 midterms. The interesting thing will be what will be the guiding principle for voting in 2020? If economics is the most important issue for a woman, not only for herself but for the men in her family, there is a chance that the split of the vote could be similar to 2016.
This feels like a digression, but at the same time, maybe Woolf from 1929 has given me insight into what is still of most concern to women in the 21st century...striving towards economic freedom.
Woolf introduces me to Aphra Behn, a playwright from the 17th century who became the first woman to make an independent living with her pen. From what I’ve briefly gathered, it seems she was a woman who lived as a man would, in pursuit of her pleasures. Woolf refers to her as “shady and amorous.” Behn was a true trailblazer; there is ever only one first, but once there is a first, we hope for a second and a third and a hundred more. The importance of Aphra’s contribution to Woolf’s own success was not lost on her. ”All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” She did make it into Westminster, but was not allowed to be buried in the Poet’s corner where she belonged.
Woolf talks about the economics of being a writer, about really needing to be born to a certain class to even receive an education that would allow the blossoms of creativity to be born. She talks about the androgynous mind and the writers who possessed it, such as Coleridge and Shakespeare. ”When one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.” Did I just hear the rattle of grinning bones from Coleridge’s grave?
Looking through my notes, there are so many more things that I could discuss about this book. It sounds like a heavy book, but it is made weightless by the stream of consciousness style Woolf uses. You really feel as if you are walking with her through the gardens of Fernham as she works to compose her thoughts on what women really want, what women really need, and how best to achieve happiness. She knows the importance, of course, of being oneself, and I think she has also made it very clear how difficult it is, but also how important it is for women to achieve...a room of their own.
‘It isn’t a question of loving him,’ said Ursula. ‘I love him well enough--c”The situation was almost ridiculous.
‘But do you love him?’ asked Dorothy.
‘It isn’t a question of loving him,’ said Ursula. ‘I love him well enough--certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I haven’t. What is it to me?’
And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt.
Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid.
‘Then what do you care about?’ she asked, exasperated.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ursula. ‘But something impersonal. Love--love--what does it mean--what does it amount to? So much personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.’
‘It isn’t supposed to lead anywhere, is it?’ said Dorothy, satirically. ‘I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.’”
When I think of epic masterpieces, I think of something of Tolstoyian length, an 800 to 1200 page monster that will consume your life for a month or two. My Everyman’s Library edition of The Rainbow weighs in at 460 pages, a rather modest number to achieve such a distinction as epic. And yet here I am declaring this an epic masterpiece.
It has been decades since I’ve read D. H. Lawrence. I was reading The Unexpected Professor by John Carey, and he talked about a lot of books, but in particular, it was his discussion of spending a summer reading all of Lawrence’s works that inspired me to consider returning to Lawrence. Carey wrestled with Lawrence, not of the homoerotic desire type, but with his structure and style. He couldn’t really say he enjoyed him or liked him, but he couldn’t stop reading him!
Aye, I understand that perfectly. I would read a big chunk of this book and set it aside, only to return to it a few days later and read another big chunk. I finally became exasperated with myself and decided to devote myself to Lawrence. In a flurry of hot reading, where I was completely immersed in the damp, black soil and the twisted sheets of the sexual revolution happening in the Nottinghamshire countryside, I finished the book, leaving myself completely spent, completely satisfied, wishing I smoked because I was in desperate need of something to settle down my hammering heart and my frayed emotional psyche.
This is a story of three generations of the Brangwen family. We have Tom and Lydia, then Anna and Will, and finish with Ursula and her torturous relationship with Anton Skrebensky. Through these characters, Lawrence explores the larger concepts of what relationships really are and our expectations for them. Certainly sex is a part of it, but what is more interesting for me is the emotional reactions that people have to one another. The misunderstandings, the misplaced passions, and ultimately with Ursula, a rejection of the need to submit to the suffocating baggage of a permanent, committed relationship.
Tom is the second husband for Lydia, which unbalances the relationship. Tom is caught up in the grand passions of his desire for his wife, but she doesn’t gulp her passions like he does. She sips them. She is more measured because she, in so many ways, has been made older from her past experiences in more than just years.
”It was not, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him in her own way, and to her own measure. And she had spent much of life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfilment. She had taken him and given him fulfilment. She still would do so, in her own times and ways. But he must control himself, measure himself to her.”
How many times do relationships fail because we try to change the person we are involved with into who we want them to be, or maybe we want to cocoon them as they are so that they never change from the person we first fell in love with?
Lawrence is adept at hitting the reader with these great moments of understanding when everything that had been so murky becomes so clear.
”She did not know him as himself. But she knew him as the man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her: an impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite.”
Anna Lensky, who is Lydia’s child by her first marriage but was raised by Tom Brangwen, marries Will Brangwen. Like most of us, she is swept up in the romance of the courtship when desire supersedes all else. That time when the possibilities are endless. Once the reality of marriage hits and she can see the halcyon days of her childhood disappearing forever in the mists of the past, she starts to rebel. She is sensitive and assumes much from Will’s inability to always express himself in terms of reassurance. She lashes out at what he loves, wanting him to share her growing misery.
Tom, for all intents and purposes her father, really puts a fine point on exactly what is driving Anna to make Will so miserable.
”’You mustn’t think I want to be miserable, ‘ she cried. ‘I don’t.’
‘We quite readily believe it,’ retorted Brangwen. ‘Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.’”
It is quite a shock to settle into quiet domesticity. Anna wants for little, but for all that, there is certainly something missing. The fresh linen feel of the courtship faze has been replaced by sheets that have been washed and washed again. It is a question we all reach at some point in our lives, sometimes many points in our lives,…Is this all there is? Will is crazy about her, but doesn’t always know how to tell her, and she takes maybe too much pleasure out of torturing him about his beliefs, but the fury this inspires does eventually prove to be an aphrodisiac.
So this all brings us to Ursula Brangwen, the oldest daughter of Will and Anna. She has opportunities that no female has ever had before in her family. She goes to college. She holds down a job outside the home. She experiences a level of independence almost equal to what she would have had if she had been born a man. This isn’t just given to her. She has to fight her family for it. As she feels herself become mired in the same marriage traps that her grandmother and mother surrendered to, she can’t let herself submit. She must escape. She wants to exist independently, not only from a husband and her family, but from everyone. She wants to always have choices and options to be who she wants to be without hindrances and to be able to seize the day without considerations. She wants to be loved without commitment and love without being subjugated.
This was heady stuff to be published in 1915.
Lydia submits to a marriage, but with her eyes wide open, and refuses to become what her husband wants her to be. Anna, in many ways spoiled with too much freedom, rebels and tries to break her husband, only to discover that the cost to both of them is too great. Her rebellion is short lived, and she gives herself over to her children, but in Ursula we can see the joining of her grandmother and mother in questioning the strictures of a society imposed submission to a man.
Why must she?
Lawrence considered this, rightly so, to be a feminist novel. Barbara Hardy, in the introduction, gives this thought an intriguing twist. ”Ursula is the first woman in English fiction who is imagined as having the need and courage for a sexual odyssey.” Ursula rails at one point, Why can’t I love a hundred men? Why must I choose one? The adventures of Ursula continue in Women in Love. I will, of course, be continuing my wrestling match with Lawrence. I would say, at this point, it might be a draw. I can only hope he is as spent as I am and will be content to lie a bit and stare at the sky and contemplate the odysseys of these women before we have to grapple once again.
”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. ”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. A minute passed and there was no sound. Then, with the ghastliness of the supernatural, in the same stealthy, noiseless, and horrifying manner, they saw the white china knob of the handle at the window turn also. Kitty, her nerves failing her, opened her mouth to scream; but, seeing what she was going to do, he swiftly put his hand over it and her cry was smothered in his fingers.”
When Kitty accepts the marriage proposal of Dr. Walter Fane, it sets off a chain of events that land them both in the middle of a cholera epidemic in Mei-Tan-Fu, China. Kitty is quickly leaving behind her debuttante years and is fast approaching an old maid status. It isn’t for lack of marriage proposals. She has plenty. She just enjoys being the center of attention for all men, rather than being confined to the servitude of one. When her younger sister, the much less attractive sister, lands a baronet, the pressure on her to be married becomes very real.
Dr. Walter Fane is not a fool, but he is a complete fool when it comes to his love of this beautiful bobble of girl who has never had to have a serious thought in her life. Even intelligent people can be blind in the ways of love. He knows Kitty doesn’t love him. He knows why she is desperately marrying him, and yet he must have believed that, given time, he can convince her that he is worth loving.
Kitty can not respect his love for her. Infatuation has always come easily for her. She has smoldering eyes and a lithe figure that drives men to distraction. ”What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?” That has been a question that has been asked for hundreds of years, if not thousands. What I have ascertained from the minefield of women that I’ve known is that a woman must not like herself very much to despise a man who loves her. It is sad that she considers him to be a fool to marry such a woman as she.
Kitty accepts his proposal impulsively. She despises his fawning attentions. She has therefore never invested any emotion or even thought into the relationship. He takes her to Hong Kong where he works as a bacteriologist. There she meets Charlie Townsend, who intuitively senses the vulnerability in their relationship. He is charming, fit, and knows the right string of words to whisper in a silly, unhappy girl’s ear. Kitty is a fool, and she can’t for the life of her understand why Walter can’t see it.
The resulting scandal, which starts with the turning of the white china knob on the door, turns out to be an embarrassing affair for all parties involved, as these things tend to do. Walter gives Kitty a choice, but as it turns out, she has only one choice, which is to follow him to Mei-Tan-Fu. ”It means death. Absolutely certain death.”
Whenever I pick up a W. Somerset Maugham book, I know I am in for a whirlwind ride fraught with betrayal, emotional upheaval, human frailty, selfishness, and aspects of malice. He explores the dark corners of our lives that are whispered about in alcoves at parties, and in shadowed doorways off of street corners. Those things about us that we hope no one knows, but we have a fearful inclination, spurred by our own guilt that everyone knows. The best solution to any scandal, in my opinion, is to brazen it out and wait for another scandal to come along to move your problems from the front page to the back page of the gossip mill. One must screw up occasionally so that everyone else feels better about themselves. It would be rather rude to be perfectly good all the time.
A masterpiece exploring the frivolous ways in which lives can be ruined.
”But life, as he had discovered, was not like a novel. Or perhaps he had mistaken fiction for truth, or, more likely, mistaken truth for a more thrill”But life, as he had discovered, was not like a novel. Or perhaps he had mistaken fiction for truth, or, more likely, mistaken truth for a more thrilling, more authentic form of fiction.”
I’ve often thought how easier life would be if I could write the dialogue for the people in my life. They get it wrong so much of the time that I often wonder why I bother with them at all. I can’t fire them, though even if I could, I’d only replace them with other people equally inept at saying the right thing that will keep the plot moving at the proper pace. Life is not a play, a novel, or a movie. It is actually rather messy.
With lots of uhhhhs and ahhhhs and ohhhhs.
Paul Sturgis has managed, not by design, to arrive at retirement without snagging a wife. He has a failing that, though properly identified, mystifies him as to why it is a disqualifying attribute for being one half of a blissful marriage.
”He had acquired girlfriends, for his hawkish looks promised a favourable outcome to each entanglement, and fell in love regularly, though never entirely wholeheartedly, longing for something more extreme, more transforming, than evenings at the theatre, dinners in restaurants, and visits to his flat, which temporary company did little to enhance, until the day, or rather the night when he was told of his failing, a character assassination that seemed to promise a lifetime of loneliness.”
You see Paul’s problem is a dastardly one. It is one that all men, by the time they reach a certain age, realize that, once you have been categorized as such by a woman, it is the kiss of death to a relationship. Yes, when she mutters those terrible words:
You are simply too nice.
In Paul’s case, they usually get hurled at him with a baffling level of anger, as if the woman knows that she is kicking a dog for laying his head on her knee. It is frustrating to women, as well as to “nice” men, reaching this perplexing impasse. Needless say, there are many women, as well, who marry perfectly nice men and are content with their relationship. I’ve never personally met these women, but I’m told they exist. The problem is that nice is perceived as boring, so if nice=boring and this is the dating stage, what would a lifetime of marriage look like? Boring, more boring, head banging against a door boring.
Thank goodness Paul has his books.
”At the sight of a bookshop he felt a desire to be in a closed space and went in, though he had little need for more books. The books he remembered had nothing to do with the life he now led, yet they promised so much in the way of revelation. This too was misleading: revelation only benefited the teller, rarely his audience. Yet such revelations that stayed with him remained his only touchstone of authenticity.”
Novels, and I hate to say this, might be part of Paul’s problem. In the controlled environment of a writer guided plot where all is revealed, the dialogue sparkles, misunderstandings are only plot devices that lead the protagonist to an emotional, music soaring, pulse pounding, sunset setting, lip locking, tongue tangling, boy gets girl (or any of the other numerous variations of hook ups) moment of pure ecstacy. Every loose string of the plot is gathered up in a nice bow. The reader does not have to wonder if Jack rides off into the sunset with Jane or if they will live happily ever after because the writer tells them they do.
Well, not the novels I read, not that I don’t mind some escapism, but I also enjoy novels that reflect real life. Things don’t always work out, and life is full of loose strings. Anita Brookner knows about the foibles of life.
Though I will say, Paul does read Henry James, and James took almost as much malicious joy as George R. R. Martin in torturing his reading public. Maybe if Paul had read Henry James as more of an instruction manual he might have been more prepared for the disappointments of life.
Paul has another problem, besides being too nice. He is in remarkably good health and is staring down the barrel of several more decades of a perfectly safe, boring, lonely existence. To stave off pondering the inevitability of his life Paul decides to shake things up and departs on a vacation to Venice to at least temporarily escape that appalling flat he bought for its trendy location. He has loathed it since the minute he first opened the door to look at it. What a ridiculous thing to find himself stuck in an ugly flat for the remaining days of his life. It is actually oddly humorous.
In Venice, he meets this vivacious divorcee who has spurned her husband because she caught him frolicking with a young woman. It seems like a small basis to throw a marriage away in Paul’s mind, but then he understands the difficulty of obtaining and keeping a relationship. As Paul gets to know Vicky better, he starts to realize how rootless her life is without a proper place to live. She relies on the kindness of strangers (Paul is saddled with bags of her luggage). To set Paul’s teeth even more on edge, she is always scheming about grand plans to go hither or yon without even a proper plan as to how to make it so.
She is a horrid, completely self-centered creature, completely unsuitable for Paul, and yet he can’t spurn her. She may prove to have a rare value indeed. To further complicate Paul’s suddenly topsy turvy existence, an old flame, one of the women who hurled his nice attributes back in his face at the vitriolic level of Taming of the Shrew, falls back into his life, much more subdued and even remembering their time together with some fondness.
So will Paul end up with Vicky or back with Sarah? Or will he catch a midnight train to some remote destination to regain some control back in his life? Loneliness can start to seem like a virtuous, wonderous existence.
Anita Brookner is known for her exploration of characters who feel isolated and abandoned by society. I’ve seen some reviewers who say nothing happens in her novels. I understand that not all great books are for all readers, but who has not experienced loneliness? I’ve always been surrounded by friends and family and well wishers, but regardless of whether I’m sitting in a room full of people or knocking around in the hallways of my own mind in an empty room, I know what loneliness is. A Brookner novel can sometimes be the perfect antidote for my own feelings of seclusion. There are times when I can walk a mile in the shoes of one of the well conceived Brookner characters with ease and too much comfort.
***Just to be clear there are two Elizabeth Taylors. One is the famous actress, and the other is the British writer. Elizabeth Taylor the writer has b***Just to be clear there are two Elizabeth Taylors. One is the famous actress, and the other is the British writer. Elizabeth Taylor the writer has been mentioned by several accomplished writers as one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century. Let’s do something about that, shall we?***
”It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticise the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware of that if ten percent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book?” ---Hilary Mantel from the Introduction to Angel
Angelica Deverell grows up in a small set of rooms over her mom’s shop. She may have live there, but she is never really there. In her mind, everything is transformed around her. Her drab dress is a beautiful gown. The worn furniture is transformed into opulent grand settees, fringed lamps, and ornate wood chifforobes. Reality is too limiting.
Angel discovers, when writing an essay for school, that while she is pouring out her thoughts onto paper is the only time she can ever remember being happy. You would think such a girl would be a reader, but there is one hangup about books that makes them impossible for her to read them. ”She had never cared much for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing and about a beautiful young girl with a startling white skin, heiress to great property, wearing white pique at Osborne and tartan taffetas at Balmoral.”
It is madness, really, to think that a seventeen year old girl, with little to no personal experience, with no real knowledge of the day to day activities of people, could write an epic novel about duchesses, counts, and the wealthy elite, and yet she does. She finds the perfect publisher, Theo Gilbright, who sees so many issues with her book, but when he discusses making a few minor changes, like champagne being opened with a corkscrew, she refuses. That is how she saw it in her head, and that it is how it must remain.
Theo’s partner thinks he is barmy for publishing the book, and the book becomes a smashing success. As many writers will attest, it goes to show what publishers or editors know about readers. How many publishers passed on Harry Potter? The list is not short.
Edward Gibbon may have written The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but Elizabeth Taylor wrote The Rise and Fall of Angelica Deverell. At the height of her success, Angel receives a visit from Nora Howe-Nevinson, an amateur poet, who is a huge fan of her books. As important as Nora is going to prove to be to Angel, she has only eyes for Nora’s brother Esme. He is the perfect wastrel for a rich woman to fall in love with.
”He had so often taken the initiative in life, without the reserves to back up his actions; he was always withdrawing from absurd forays he should never have set out on. The emotions he had inspired in other people were not peaceful ones, adoration turned into contempt, desire to jealous anger. His life had been hindered by his beauty and the adventures it had permitted him.”
He is a painter by trade, maybe even a good one, but to be good and be known takes lots of effort and more than a bit of luck, and Esme is blessed with neither of those qualities in sizeable amounts.
He does see the majestic qualities about Angel that few can really see.
”The blue-black hair lay against her cream-coloured arms; the skin under her armpits was a deeper colour, of a shade near apricot. With his eyes half-closed he tried to set limits to the picture he saw, as if he were going to paint her as she sat upright among the tumbled bedclothes and the crumpled pillows. The raven hair was a wonderful contrast to the gradations of white through cream to warm yellow. He studied the textures of the linen with its grey shadows and her skin with its golden lights. He sat and considered her, trying to see her afresh, wondering what she was like, as he had often wondered when they were first acquainted.”
Now that is a painting I would buy, but Esme never paints it. He fritters away his days doing anything but lifting a paint brush. Angel is hard to like. Compliments from her are few and far between. She is emotionally stunted, and keeps everyone a pole length away. She is rude, too honest, and difficult to please. When a person builds glittering sand castles in her mind, the real world is a very dull and dreary place. For all of her issues, I can’t help marveling at her dedication to writing and her devotion to the worlds she creates.
There are epic female characters in literature like Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O’Hara, Lisbeth Salander, and Mrs. Danvers. Angel shares characteristics of all these women, and certainly she will join my list of greatest female literary creations who will always inspire me with their greatness and their human frailties.
”Her friend and neighbour, Penelope Milne, who, tight-lipped, was prepared to forgive her only on condition that she disappeared for a decent length o”Her friend and neighbour, Penelope Milne, who, tight-lipped, was prepared to forgive her only on condition that she disappeared for a decent length of time and came back older, wiser, and properly apologetic. For I am not to be allowed my lapse, as if I were an artless girl, she thought; and why should I be? I am a serious woman who should know better and am judged by my friends to be past the age of indiscretion; several people have remarked upon my physical resemblance to Virginia Woolf; I am a householder, a ratepayer, a good plain cook, and a deliverer of typescripts well before the deadline; I sign anything that is put in front of me; I never telephone my publisher; and I make no claims for my particular sort of writing, although I understand that it is doing quite well.”
Edith Hope was supposed to get married, but at the 11th hour decided that it would be a grave mistake. Not the getting married part, but the getting married to the man who quite possibly might stupefy her to death.
As crushing as being lonely can be, doubling down by being married to a person who doesn’t make your heart beat faster when you hear their footsteps only adds another layer of unhappiness that can lead to rocks in pockets and an immersion in the closest river.
But now that she has proven herself unstable, she obviously needs some time for self reflection (as if she doesn’t do that enough all the time), hopefully to return repentant for all the trouble she put her friends through with this rather unexpected lapse of judgment.
See what they don’t know
is
that
she has a lover.
He is unavailable except for short lustful encounters and too brief moments of domesticity that are so wonderful that she starts to envision what she wants. ”My idea of happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening, every evening.”
Is that too much to ask? Is that really just too much to hope for?
She has been dispatched to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. I’d say she was fleeing, but that isn’t quite right. It has been strongly suggested by her friends and acquaintances that she requires some time to come to different decisions.
Frankly, I’d say she needs different friends and acquaintances.
At least maybe in this plush hotel in the offseason, she can find some unusual characters who will add flesh to her characters in a novel.
Like this lovely, melancholy woman:
”Naturally, she sulks. She eats cakes as others might go slumming. But she is very sad because she longs for a child and I don’t think she will ever have one. She is so beautiful, so thin, so over-bred. Her pelvis is like a wishbone!”
Or how about the infuriating Philip Neville, who challenges everything she believes seemingly for his own amusement:
”He conducts himself altogether gracefully. He is well turned out, she thought, surveying the panama hat and the linen jacket. He is even good-looking: an eighteenth-century face, fine, reticent, full-lipped, with a faint bluish gleam of beard just visible beneath the healthy skin. A heartless man, I think. Furiously intelligent. Suitable.”
Suitable?
Edith is still writing every chance she gets. After all, she has never missed a deadline. It is something she can control, and escaping into her writing is therapeutic, though a singular endeavor by design. Even so, she has not emerged from her “lapse in judgment” unscathed. ”She felt a weariness that seemed to preclude any enthusiasm, any initiative, any relaxation. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties, since when she was writing she could only read something she had read before, and in her exhausted state, a febrile agitation, invisible to the naked eye, tended to distance even the very familiar.”
If I am too exhausted or too stressed to read, I am in worst shape than what most people could really understand. I could see Edith patting my hand with the proper amount of sympathy, serving me some hot tea, and some of her plain cooking while we chatted amiably under a lattice garden shade.
Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984. She published her first novel at the age of 53, so there is hope for all us late blooming writers. She writes about loneliness and unattainable love with characters who have difficulty fitting into normal society. Interestingly enough, she never married, but stayed home and took care of her aging parents. I think she knew of what she wrote. I’ve seen the criticism leveled at her accusing her of writing the same book over and over again with very similar themes. I’ve only read one book by her, so I can’t really comment on that criticism except to say that sometimes there is comfort in picking up a writer and knowing exactly what the basic themes of the plot will be. Since I identify with characters like Edith Hope, I can certainly see myself returning to the world of Anita Brookner, while steaming the glass of the mirror she holds up for me.
I’ve fallen in love with the Schlegel sisters twice now in separate decades. I plan to keep falling in love with them for many decades to come. They are vibrant defenders of knowledge, of books, of art, of travel, of feeling life in the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and spleen on a daily basis. Margaret and Helen have a brother, Tibby, poor lad, who is plenty bright while at Oxford, but in the family Schlegel home, he is struggling to keep up with the thoughts expressed that keep expanding past him.
Compared to most people, they are rich. Compared to most rich people, they are poor. Their ancestors left them with enough capital to insure that they don’t have to work for the rest of their lives, can travel a bit, can go to the theatre, and can buy books as they need them. They are very attuned to their privileged position and are frequently tempted to reduce their capital by helping those in need. How much money do they really need or, for that matter, really deserve to have?
Improbably, the Schlegel sisters become friends with the Wilcoxes, a capitalistic family who have a different idea of money. Is there ever enough? Helen forms a temporary attachment to the younger Wilcox which throws each family into a tizzy as to the suitability of the match. Margaret begins a friendship with the wife, Ruth, that proves so strong that it throws a few wrinkles into the plot regarding Ruth’s family and the inheritance of Howards End.
Ruth passes away suddenly. ”How easily she slipped out of life?” Her insignificance in life becomes even more pronounced in her death.
E. M. Forster based Howards End on his childhood home, The Rooks Nest, which had been owned by a family named Howard and referred to as the Howard house. Thus, the name Howards End is a not too subtle reference to that family home. I have to believe that it might have represented a lifetime longing he had for those childhood years he spent in that home. In the novel, Howards End goes beyond being an estate and becomes almost a character, a Shangri-La that I began to pine for from the very beginning of the novel. The Sisters have only brief contact with Howards End through the early part of the novel, and my trepidation grows as the plot progresses. Will they ever have a chance to consider the house a home?
The Schlegel’s befriend the Basts, who are certainly in much reduced circumstances compared to their own. By mere chance they are discussing the Basts situation with Henry Wilcox, who promptly puts doubt into their mind about the future validity of the company Leonard is working for. This sets off a chain of events that cause a series of ripples that change the course of several lives. There certainly is a word of caution in meddling in others’ affairs. Sometimes we can think we are helping, only to cause even more problems.
Improbably, Margaret and Henry Wilcox form a friendship that becomes romantic. The eldest Wilcox son, Charles, is not happy about the attachment. He and Margaret are so far apart in their views of how the world works or should work that they have difficulty communicating well enough to reach a point of mutual respect. ”They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.”
Margaret’s odd relationship with Henry causes a rift between the sisters that is, frankly, painful to experience. Forster makes sure that I, as a reader, at this point can no longer be objective. The relationship between these siblings is a precious thing and to think of it torn asunder is impossible to accept. They know so well how to entertain each other, to finish each other’s thoughts, and share a general agreement on most things that other people who bump around in the orbit of their reality feel like intruders.
So the marriage between Margaret and Henry is unsettling to Helen and me for numerous reasons, but this statement might sum up how we feel pretty well: ”How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be.” There is probably someone we could feel is good enough for Margaret, but not just Margaret but Helen and this reader as well (see how invested I am?); for whomever either girl would marry would have to slip seamlessly into the state of euphoria that already exists in the Schlegel household.
Henry is not that person. ”He misliked the word ‘interesting’, connoting it with wasted energy and even with morbidity.”
It is becoming impossible to think that Howards End will remain nothing more than a shimmering presence in another reality.
The Schlegel sisters are really the best friends any reader could hope for. We would be so enriched by the opportunity to know them and practically giddy to be able to call them friends. It is unnerving that something so strong, like this relationship between sisters, can be so fragile. I haven’t discussed the fascinating nuances of plot that will add further weight to the interactions between the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts, for I want everyone to read this book and marvel at the words and thoughts that Forster tosses in the air for you to catch. I want you all to be as haunted as I have been, to the point that you, too, will have to go back to the place you first met these characters, these ghostly beings, and read and read again turning these phantoms into tangible beings you can almost touch.
”Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
”I dozed on my bed until sunrise and then set out resolutely to find a coffee, traversing the old city with affection and distress, hearing my own sha”I dozed on my bed until sunrise and then set out resolutely to find a coffee, traversing the old city with affection and distress, hearing my own sharp footsteps on the pavements, disembodied as a ghost. Avignon! Its shabby lights and sneaking cats were the same as ever; overturned dustbins, the glitter of fish scales, olive oil, broken glass, a dead scorpion. All the time we had been away on our travels round the world it had stayed pegged here at the confluence of its two green rivers. The past embalmed it, the present could not alter it. So many years of going away and coming back, of remembering and forgetting it. It had always waited for us, floating among its tenebrous monuments, the corpulence of its ragged bells, the putrescence of its squares.”
We first meet Bruce Drexel when he is traveling home to Avignon after learning of the “suicide” of his best friend, Piers, who was more like a brother to him. In fact, he was his brother-in-law as Bruce is married to Piers’ sister Sylvie. The three of them were close, so close that idle speculation might allude to the fact that Bruce married Sylvie only to be closer to Piers (his lover). Their friend Rob Sutcliffe was so struck by their entwined relationship that he made them the subject of one of his novels. Sutcliffe, too, has perished, but his lingering shadow keeps slithering along the walls of the plot, long after he has gone, by way of his notebooks and letters. Given that I am an amateur reviewer, I couldn’t help, but laugh at his description of reviewers. ”The reviews of his new book were all bad or grudging. A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.”
I can’t imagine that Lawrence Durrell ever had to suffer bad reviews, of course not.
This lug-worm in the liver of literature will squirm on.
The fact that Bruce was returning from a post far from the gothic dilapidated halls of Verfeuille and his wife Sylvie left behind begs the question of the current status of their relationship, and with Piers now gone, is the connection too tenuous to continue? There was once passion. ”When I closed my eyes the darkness throbbed around us and once more I returned to relive, re-experience the soft scroll of her tongue which pressed back mine and probed steadily downwards across chest and stomach to settle at last, throbbing like a hummingbird on my sex. I held that beautiful head between my palms like something disembodied, and rememorised the dark hair cropped down, and then spurred up into its chignon, the crumpled ears of a new-born lamb, the white teeth and lips upon which I would soon slowly and deliberately graft back my happy kisses.”
The soft scroll of her tongue and then throbbing like a hummingbird --quick, someone dash a pail of ice cold water in my face. Let me just say, it has been too long since I’ve read Durrell, but what I do remember from reading him before is the weight of every one of his sentences. His words choices are lush and unusual. His supporting characters are all fascinating, and each adds new levels of interest to the plot and, in some cases, new insight into the trinity of main characters. ”Toby as a victim of the historical virus could not look at the town without seeing it historically, so to speak--layer after layer of history laid up in slices, embodied in its architecture.” As another sufferer of the historical virus, Toby and I would be fast friends or fast enemies if our interpretations of history differed. Or maybe Piers and I would have been that special kind of friends for our mutual love of books. ”Though he had always been a bit of a dandy his choice of apparel was scanty, but choice, with a distinct leaning towards clothes made for him in London. A couple of medium-sized trunks were enough to house personal possessions of this kind; but the books were a different matter--Piers could not live without books, and plenty of them. This explained the sagging home-made bookshelves knocked together from pieces of crate.”
Probably about 80% of the bookshelves in my house have been knocked together by myself, not of crate, but of cheap pine. I build shelves myself because I have to take advantage of every square inch of my library, so shelves are designed to go from ceiling to floor to not lose precious book inches.
The characters are so interesting, do we even need a plot? Indeed, we do. The issue really revolves around: ”Trash was taking an English lesson with a French whore who had the longest tongue in Christendom. What happiness he knew, in all his innocence, what pride in this girl with the slit of a mouth--so spoiled and gracile a slender body.” Ok, I’m just messing with you. The plot does not revolve around the whore with the longest tongue. Though once you read those couple of sentences, one can’t help pondering the benefits of having such a long tongue, given her chosen profession.
The trio of Bruce, Sylvie, and Piers met a guru who led them into the deserts of Egypt for a mind expanding experience with the help of mind altering drugs. Akkad then infused his discussions with pearls of infinite wisdom that made it seem that he may possess the answers to all the greatest questions. They were all impressed, but Piers felt like he had finally found what he had been looking for his whole life. Something larger than himself to believe in. Is it a religion, a philosophy, or a cult? The most successful spiritual organizations manage to blend some of all three.
The circumstances of Piers’s suicide were, needless to say, suspicious. Unless he found and ordered a do-it-yourself guillotine kit or figured out how to rig a flashing blade with springs and levers, then someone had to help him, or should I say murder him? As Bruce pulled the pieces together, it became more and more clear that the cult in the desert may have very well had a hand in executing, as Piers liked to call himself, the last of the Templars.
The subtitle of this novel is The Prince of Darkness, and certainly there are gothic overtones throughout the whole novel. The setting is around World War Two, but the book has a decided Victorian feel to it. There is more light in the world in the 1940s, but this novel definitely feels like a time when darkness was only lightened by flickering candles and dancing gas flames. The writing, as I’ve mentioned, is so evocative and so succulent that I had black ink on my teeth and (normal lengthed) tongue as I masticated each sentence, trying to steal Durrell’s vast talent...and make it mine.
“‘Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.’
‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares“‘Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.’
‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.’”
I am glad that in 1847 Charlotte Bronte made the decision to publish her novel under a male pseudonym. Currer Bell had a much better chance of being published than Charlotte Bronte and, with reviewers and readers assuming that she was in fact a male writer, allowed the novel a chance to be weighed properly without prejudice. Jane Eyre became a bestseller. The question is, of course, would the novel have been so successful or even published at all if CHARLOTTE BRONTE had been emblazoned on the cover? I like to think that some editor would have realized the bloody brilliance of the story and would have published it anyway, even if they didn’t spend any money on promoting it. Would readers have bought it? Hopefully, word would have trickled out about how compelling the plot was, and people would have overcome their natural prejudice for reading a novel by a woman.
So isn’t it fun that Charlotte tricked everyone, including her own father? She did not confess her efforts to him until she had become successful. Even writing these words, I have a smile on my face thinking of this successful bamboozlement of publishers, editors, and readers.
The story, of course, is larger than the book. Most people with any kind of inquisitive nature have been exposed to the bare bones of this novel without ever reading the book. Maybe they watched a movie based on the book, or maybe they have heard it referenced. Once read, it is impossible for people not to use aspects of this novel as common reference points for other readers.
Take Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester himself, the master of Thornfield Hall. He is a brooding, complicated, dark, and intelligent creature. He is a force of nature who conforms the world around him with every stride he takes or every word that drops from his lips. He is the embodiment of the Lord Byron character. It doesn’t matter that he is not handsome. He is powerful. Women swoon in his presence and, after a carefully administered smelling salt, might start calculating what he is worth a year.
Rochester is completely taken by Jane Eyre, practically from the moment they meet. The drama of their meeting is one of those great cinematic scenes in the history of literature. Bronte incorporates many scenes into the novel that are, frankly, gifts to future movie renditions. Rochester has never met anyone quite like her. He is not alone. Everyone who comes into contact with Jane Eyre knows they have met a unique person. She is a kind and pleasant person, but she will not brook any discriminations against her character.
Mrs. Reed (her aunt), Mr. Brocklehurst (director of Lowood School attended by Jane), Mr. St John Eyre Rivers (minister who asks to marry her), and even Mr. Rochester, all attempt to conform Jane to the acceptable, deferring Victorian woman of the time. To call this a feminist novel does put it in a box which constrains it too tightly. Jane or Charlotte, either one, would loosen those bindings and let it breath as Charlotte’s intentions with this novel go well beyond the confines of any specific genre. I found her ideas of female equality, embodied so wonderfully in the character of Jane, inspiring. ”Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their effort, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
I hear you, Charlotte.
Can you imagine the impact of such words on your typical, Victorian housewife? A woman who has lived her whole life being the daughter of her father, the wife of her husband, the mother of her sons. She has been passed from the care of one man after another. If she were fortunate enough to be born pretty, she has that brief moment of power when suiters contend for her hand, but probably, ultimately, her father would decide who was best for her to marry. How about the impact of reading this novel on the typical, Victorian man? Did he look up from this book and peer over at his wife, she looking rosy in the firelight, knitting away at some frivolous thing, and think...does she want more? Or maybe he sees his pretty daughter enter the room on the verge of womanhood, and does he consider the possibility that she wants or deserves more?
There is no spark of revolution inspired by this book, but I do hope that this book may have chipped away at some of the archaic ideas of inequality. Maybe a few women readers realized that some of those secret desires they have harbored their whole life were not such strange concepts. When Jane stands up to the conformists she encounters, she is willing to take the punishment because she knows in her soul that what she believes about herself is incontestable.
This is no better illustrated than in her interactions with (I’m sorry to say this because it isn’t completely fair) the odious St. John Eyre Rivers. He wants to marry her but only for the sake that he believes she will make a wonderful, useful, missionary wife. He doesn’t love her. She is willing to go, but only as a “sister,” not as a wife. Jane refuses to compromise, but there is this moment where she is teetering in the balance. I’m mentally screaming to her at this point. ”I shuddered as he spoke: I felt his influence in my marrow--his hold on my limbs.” He is a cold man who would have gladly marched OUR Jane off to some godforsaken part of the world to die some horrible death from disease or from simple neglect.
I know the plot; and yet, I’m still completely invested in every scene. There is always the possibility that I’ve fallen into an alternative universe and I am reading some other version of Jane Eyre with a completely different ending. I can assure everyone this did not happen.
When Jane is residing with Mrs. Read, she describes her place to sleep as a “small closet.” I can’t help but think of the closet under the stairs at 4 Privet Drive. Like Harry Potter, she is also an orphan but still with a rebellious streak because she is also sure that she is supposed to be someone other than who she is currently perceived to be. The relief she experiences when she learns she is getting away from the condescending attitude of the Read house and going away to school at Lowood also reminds me of Harry’s relief to discover he, too, is escaping to Hogwarts. Though I must say Harry, despite the trials and tribulations he experiences, draws a better straw than Miss Jane.
I really enjoyed the gothic elements; those were, to a degree, completely unexpected. ”’Oh sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face--it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!’
‘Ghost are usually pale, Jane.’
‘This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?’
‘You may.’
‘Of the foul German spectre--the Vampyre.’”
There are noises in the night at Thornfield Hall. There is an unknown tenant locked away in the rafters of the house. There are secrets. There are unexpected fires. There are scandals waiting to be known. In fact, the twists of the plot were considered so outrageous for the time that the book acquired a reputation for being “improper.” This helped to boost sales further.
The Bronte family was very close. They grew up conceiving their own stories and fantasies and acting them out in impromptu plays. All three girls and the brother, Branwell, were writers. Tragically, they all died young. Charlotte outlived them all, dying in 1855 at the age of 38 with her unborn child. Branwell (31) and Emily (30) both passed away in 1848, and Anne died the following year at the age of 29. Can you imagine having to bury all your siblings? It must have felt like the spectre of death was stalking the Brontes.
What makes Rochester unique is that he does eventually see Jane the way she sees herself. ”Fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life, but the desire of his eyes.” I will remember that line ”desire of his eyes” for a long time. She is a hidden gem in rooms full of people. Charlotte Bronte makes some good points through Jane’s eyes at how unaware wealthy people are of the true natures of those who serve them.
I would talk about the love story, but what is there to say. It is one for the ages. I would say that Charlotte Bronte never found her Rochester in real life, but some letters have come to light, written to a man named Constantin Héger, that suggests that maybe she did. He was married to someone else, and when Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the biography of her friend, she carefully edited out those very revealing letters of a love that could never be.
Jane Eyre, may you always find the readers you deserve.
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