For he on honey-dew hath fed,
I just finished Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë was a very good writer — her prose is beautiful and a joy to read. However, life in the mid 19th century was dreadfully boring, and this comes through fairly clearly in the book; not a whole hell of a lot happens. There’s a lot of whining and a lot of righteous suffering and a kind of Dickensian trick ending (although it’s not an entirely happy ending, which is nice). Some passages are really beautiful, like this one from the preface:
“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the second. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the crown of thorns.”
Or this, from chapter 9:
“And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell; and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round and unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood — the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.”
Great stuff; I just wish some actual stuff would go on amid all that great writing.
I’m about to start Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which is part on of the His Dark Materials trilogy. I’ve heard it’s good, and that’s it’s written for kids, so I ought to get through it pretty quickly. It’ll be a nice change from Ms. Eyre’s fantastic adventures in housekeeping and being upset.