Thursday, August 12, 2010

Deep questions

Why did I enjoy Shirley more than any of the modern books I tried to read just after it? Why wasn't I bothered about Charlotte Brontë's overuse of coincidence, her ambivalence about her Irish background (which I share with her), or her habit of pairing off her characters with their first cousins?

Oh, I don't know, maybe because it had likeable though flawed characters, and I wanted to see how the story ended. (I'd expected more of a death rate -- and it's said Charlotte Brontë may have originally planned more, but then three of her siblings died while she was writing the book, and she'd had enough.)

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