Reading: Shirley
Zach giggles every time he sees the title. "Shirley," he'll say. "How absurd." One of the guys at work tried to make an Airplane! joke (which is right up there with Monty Python as far as my humor tolerance goes and just a reminder: I hate Monty Python). And the novel is 600 tiny-fonted pages long.
I'm not sure why I'm continuing to read it.
Shirley comes pretty soon after Jane Eyre, but rather than focusing on the life of one character, Brontë is anticipating George Eliot's Middlemarch. The time is at the beginning of the 19th century, and there's some mishigas between the French and the English (Napoleon's being naughty and the English figure that hurting themselves economically will teach those dirty Frenchies a lesson). This also coincides with England's industrial revolution, so skilled laborers are finding themselves replaced by machines and floundering in an economy that's no where near prepared to deal with this level of unemployment.
That's the first four or so chapters. Like I said, the book's written in a microscopic font size, and clocks in at a dense 600 pages -- and I haven't even met the titular Shirley yet. Part of the problem is that I just read those two Mary Elizabeth Braddons in pretty quick succession -- and they were both fairly action-packed sensation novels (well, "action packed" for a Victorian novel). This is something slower-paced, and it's a bit of a mental redirect. I'm a hundred pages in, and no one has been poisoned, accused of being someone dead, come back as a man named Raymond, or married to her own brother. However, nothing much else has happened, either. Some frames were destroyed that would have helped a character build his textile mill. There's quite a bit of general unrest and unease. But that's pretty much all I've got.
There was this, though:
"You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test - some, it is said, die under it - you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. This you are not aware of, perhaps, at the time, and so cannot borrow courage of that hope. Nature, however, as has been intimated, is an excellent friend in such cases, sealing the lips, interdicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation - a dissimulation often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down to sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because it is half-bitter."
I'm not sure why I'm continuing to read it.
Shirley comes pretty soon after Jane Eyre, but rather than focusing on the life of one character, Brontë is anticipating George Eliot's Middlemarch. The time is at the beginning of the 19th century, and there's some mishigas between the French and the English (Napoleon's being naughty and the English figure that hurting themselves economically will teach those dirty Frenchies a lesson). This also coincides with England's industrial revolution, so skilled laborers are finding themselves replaced by machines and floundering in an economy that's no where near prepared to deal with this level of unemployment.
That's the first four or so chapters. Like I said, the book's written in a microscopic font size, and clocks in at a dense 600 pages -- and I haven't even met the titular Shirley yet. Part of the problem is that I just read those two Mary Elizabeth Braddons in pretty quick succession -- and they were both fairly action-packed sensation novels (well, "action packed" for a Victorian novel). This is something slower-paced, and it's a bit of a mental redirect. I'm a hundred pages in, and no one has been poisoned, accused of being someone dead, come back as a man named Raymond, or married to her own brother. However, nothing much else has happened, either. Some frames were destroyed that would have helped a character build his textile mill. There's quite a bit of general unrest and unease. But that's pretty much all I've got.
There was this, though:
"You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test - some, it is said, die under it - you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. This you are not aware of, perhaps, at the time, and so cannot borrow courage of that hope. Nature, however, as has been intimated, is an excellent friend in such cases, sealing the lips, interdicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation - a dissimulation often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down to sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because it is half-bitter."
posted by Mike at 9:58 AM
2 Comments:
My mien is quite often gay.
You know, I read that book a while ago and I remember it being really tough in the beginning, but I loved it eventually.
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