“The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely: I walked fast till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and to analyse the species of pleasure brooding for me in the hour and situation. It was three o’clock; the church bell tolled as I passed under the bellfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.”
—Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre (via princessnymeria)
April 2012
56 posts
“I’ve always known myself. But he was the first to recognize me… and to love what he saw.”
—
Jane about Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre 2006
(I love this quote. *happy sob*)
“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 efforts 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 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.”
—Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte (via missprunesandprisms)
March 2012
2 posts
February 2012
15 posts
Jane Eyre was robbed. ROBBED.
“He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;—I am sure he is—I feel akin to him—I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him … I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered:—and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.”
—exc. from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (via p-e-c-h-e-u-r)
I love you, Edward Fairfax Rochester.
“”It’s as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your frame… I am afraid if that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly for you.”
—(via gossamerview)
charlotte bronte's villette
i actively dislike this book and wish i had the ability to stop reading a novel i dislike (on the road wins the prize for the only book that has made me do that).
i feel like it is lying to me about being interesting. or, rather, it is lying to me about lucy snow being interesting. in some ways i am finding all the characters range from unlikeable to uninteresting. and the unlikeable ones are unlikeable in uninteresting ways. and some of the uninteresting one’s have interesting outlines. madame beck and her snooping, for example, could be fascinating. but sometimes i feel what i feel while reading a play - that it would take a director and actors to actually bring the characters to life.
and lucy snow. i feel like she keeps telling me she’s interesting, and sometimes she does interesting things and says she has emotions, but she never has any interesting thoughts or observations. i feel like bronte is telling me she’s interesting without showing me she’s interesting. basically i know when she’s irritated. and i LOVE irritation. but her irritation is boring me.
plus charlotte bronte seems to have really uninteresting taste in dickhead abusive men. and the whole dickhead abusive man shows interest in really abusive way in girl who is smart unlike other girls is so boring. wuthering heights, as i remember, is so much more interesting!
i’m disappointed because i liked the way it started because i thought it was so fucking weird. just a chapter of lucy, barely there, observing some very strange melancholic little girl.
i’m like 350 pages in and it’s taking me forever. i am doing this thing where i am reading every unread book in my home. and before this was mansfield park - the thought of reading that was awful but it ended up being wonderful! i loved fanny. i would suppose some find her moralistic, but fuck, i’m moralistic when it comes to the upper classes and their fuckery! when she was disgusted with the group for staging a play where engaged women would have to make out with men other than their fiances, i was disgusted too! plus i had an emotional sense of why she liked the dude she liked, and a sense of the personalities of the characters as it relates to emotional manipulation. villette is just boring the shit out of me.
What does Bessie mean when she tells Jane that John Reed was “plucked” in college?
“Writing anonymously on the Yorkshire moors, Bronte appeals directly to our sense of victimization, our smothered superiority. Why are we not loved? Why don’t people recognize us for who we really are? How long must we endure this “ever-torturing pain”? These are the broiling adolescent questions that ‘Jane Eyre’ gives voice to in such full-throated cries. The novel allows us to luxuriate in our wounded sense of others’ unreasonable disregard for how wonderful we really are. And that same tone of emotional extravagance is reflected in the marvelously gothic plot of ‘Jane Eyre’ that finally bursts into flames and consumes everything.”
—from a Washington Post book review by Ron Charles of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a book that tries to be a modern retelling of Jane Eyre but fails (via laughgiant)
