Archimedes Forgets

Chapter 4: Family dynamics, oh, my!

2012-01-25T15:11:00.000-05:00

The chapter opens with Rachel heading off to take some food to a neighbor in need -- which, Judith explains, means she's going to do all the neighbor's housework too.

Needless to say, Judith is not a big supporter of her mother's charitable habits. Mercy, on the other hand, thinks it makes perfect sense. And besides, there's work to be done.

But wait! First, there are dresses.

Judith convinces Kit to open her trunks and show off some of the fashions she brought from Barbados. There's still no real affection between these two, but they're teenage girls, so clothes are sort of a universal language.

It is, unfortunately, a language not spoken by most fathers -- including Matthew.

"Her uncle regarded her with scorn. 'No one in my family has any use for such frippery,' he said coldly. 'Nor are we beholden to anyone's charity for our clothing.'"

But Kit does manage to score half a point -- or maybe just a quarter of one -- by convincing Matthew to let her give Mercy a very plain wool shawl. And a bit of authorial hand-waving alerts us to the fact that Mercy is pretty much the hub of the Wood family.

"Very well. Mercy may keep the shawl."

And then Kit's score goes deep into negative territory, because her question, when the rest of the family starts talking about the chores that have to get done, is, "Don't the servants do that?"

Setting aside slightly contentious aspects of using "servant" in a New England setting, ¹ the answer to that is a big no. So Kit learns to work.

There's carding to be done, for one thing. And as much as Kit totally despises it, we've got Mercy's placid acceptance of the task to serve as a counterpoint.

"How dreary it must be for her, working here day after day. Kit was ashamed of her own impatience."

Also, there's scrubbing and cooking and more fun stuff ahead. But putting Kit and Mercy together at a sedentary activity gives Speare a chance to build up a bit more backstory. Here we get to learn more about why exactly Kit left Barbados, and the man she had the opportunity to marry:

"He was very kind. But Mercy, he was fifty years old, and he had pudgy red fingers with too many rings on them."

Willing to basically buy a wife? Okay. But unattractive hands are a deal-breaker.

In the course of heading up to bed that night, Kit overhears a bit of a conversation that introduces another aspect of the Wood family's dysfunctions:

"Yes, a boy would have been different, that's true. Poor Matthew!"

For my part, I think this makes the Kit's-not-a-boy thing sound like a much bigger deal than it actually turns out to be -- it's really never a factor in the plot. But we'll return to it in a future chapter, for a bit more background information.

One other thing to mention at the end of this chapter. Speare is not noted for her sensitive treatment of native characters in her books (see Debbie Reese's blog if you require an explanation), and although there are no native characters in The Witch of Blackbird Pond, we do get several mentions of them. The first one is here.

"The long eerie noise sounded again. Indians?"

¹ Setting it aside mainly because I'm not sure whether it applies to the early colonial period, when there was a much closer connection to the English class structure. But in the late colonial/early Federal periods, free-born white Americans did not want to think of themselves as servants. Bill Bryson cites one instance of a maid explaining to a foreign visitor that she was her employer's "help," not his servant, and Fanny Trollope totally goes off on the servant question in Domestic Manners of the Americans. (Which book deserves its own post -- there was a serious bite in that woman's prose!)

(Post pic: Cheating a little, since this dress is from about twenty years after the book is set; courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's amazing collection database.)

Chapter 3: Culture Shock Continues

2012-01-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

Kit is just now realizing that things in Wethersfield really aren't going to live up to her expectations. And if the descriptions of dirt roads and dewy expanses of grass don't get that across, Speare throws in this gem:

"Along with her pretty shoes, Kit's spirits sank lower at each step."

Unsurprisingly, Kit is not happy about this. She's also not thrilled with the pretensions of this little village that claims to have real streets and everything. Anyone who's grown up in cosmopolitan Barbados knows better.

"High Street indeed! No more than a cow path!"

You can just imagine what a Londoner would have been thinking.

Captain Eaton and his men unload Kit's trunks once they've confirmed that this is, in fact, the right house, and they head bad to the Dolphin. And for anyone who doesn't already suspect that we're going to be seeing more of Nat Eaton, Speare makes it obvious that there's unfinished business here.

"As their eyes met, something flashed between them, a question that was suddenly weighted with regret. But the instant was gone before she could grasp it, and the mocking light had sprung again into his eyes."

But now the source of interpersonal conflict shifts as we meet Kit's relatives. There's Uncle Matthew, with his "tall angular body" and prototypical Puritan austerity, and Aunt Rachel, a faded and tired version of the woman Kit imagined. And the cousins, Judith ("this girl could have been the toast of a regiment!" -- alas, I neglected to count how often this phrase or a variation is used, but trust me, it's a lot) and Mercy (whose limp is described as "grotesque," but who is of course strong and sweet and the first person to make Kit feel a little bit welcome).

Kit's not looking forward to explaining her unannounced arrival to Matthew, who's clearly the head of the family, but when he notices that she's brought seven trunks ("The whole town will be talking about it by nightfall.") with her, the truth emerges:

"'I have not come for a visit, sir,' she answered. 'I have come to stay with you.'"

And the details follow: Kit's grown up rich, but when her grandfather died, there were financial irregularities (not his fault, of course) and debts that more or less equaled the value of his estate.

Kit notices that Matthew does seem to appreciate the fact that she made sure all the debts were paid before she left Barbados, but she doesn't think he quite gets what a change it was -- after all, she had to sell her personal slave to pay for her passage, and no one in the Wood household seems to care.

You know how writers are advised to put the main character in a bad situation, and then make it worse? In the next chapter we'll see Speare doing just that.

Tidbit: Scarlet

2012-01-14T12:12:00.000-05:00

Scarlet, A.C. Gaughen. (Bloomsbury, 2/14/2012)

I kind of, sort of, virtually-know the author (we both worked on the Kids Heart Authors project a few years back), so that's what initially drew me to the book. But the premise should do it, too: Robin Hood's colleague Will Scarlet was actually a woman. This is perfect for fans of Katsa and Fire who need something to tide them over until Bitterblue's pub date. Scar totally fits into the emotionally-damaged-but-physically-tough-heroine mode, and I mean that in a good way. And best of all? This is straight-up historical fiction, with no fantasy bits thrown in.

(Review copy provided by publisher.)

Tidbit: Quiet

2012-01-13T12:04:00.000-05:00

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain. (Crown, 1/24/2012)

I don't often get excited about business books, but I'm so glad a Random House sales rep pushed this one into my pile at NEIBA. Fellow introverts, you will join me in realizing why you do stuff (not just the obvious "prefer to be alone" things, but more subtle aspects of behavior) every time Cain throws out a new piece of research. Some of the evolutionary psych aspects of introversion are pretty fascinating, too.

(Review copy provided by publisher, obviously.)

Tidbit: Mysterious Bones

2012-01-12T11:58:00.000-05:00

Mysterious Bones: The Story of Kennewick Man, Katherine Kirkpatrick. (Holiday House, 5/1/2011)

Lots of anthropology-nerd appeal here in this very balanced account of the saga of the human remains known as Kennewick Man. Kirkpatrick never sides with the scientists who wanted to study the remains or the local tribes who claimed him as an ancestor, but there's room to make an argument for either.

(Review copy provided by publisher.)

Tidbit: The Mighty Miss Malone

2012-01-11T11:51:00.001-05:00

The Mighty Miss Malone, Christopher Paul Curtis. (Wendy Lamb, 1/10/2012)

If you know your children's books, I shouldn't have to say anything more than "Christopher Paul Curtis" to sell this one. But in case you're longing to be convinced: It's not a sequel to Bud, Not Buddy, but it is a companion book, filling in the story of one of the minor characters. And you will want to fight for Miss Deza Malone just as hard as she fights for herself. Curtis walks a fine line, considering his characters are dealing with both racial prejudice and the Great Depression, but Deza's world is never so bleak you can't imagine her succeeding.

(Review copy provided by publisher.)

Chapter 2: Kit learns about New Englanders, Part I

2012-01-11T09:56:00.000-05:00

Kit is incredibly bored in this chapter. The Dolphin spends nine days getting from Saybrook to Wethersfield, a distance roughly equal to how far current Connecticut residents will drive to get to a mall.

But this is the second chapter of the book, so the reader's not allowed to be bored or worn out by the whole "are we there yet" thing. So we get occasional bouts of her frustration -- and the sailors' lack of it -- mixed with character development and further spinning of plot threads.

The Cruffs aren't speaking to Kit (which, when you think about what a small space they were occupying, is a pretty impressive feat), but she's got an eye on them, and she doesn't like what she sees.

"Once or twice she had seen the father furtively slip child an extra morsel from his but he was plainly too spineless to stand up for her against shrew of a wife."

She's also got her eye on John Holbrook

"There he sat, hour after hour, so intent that often his lips moved, and two spots of color burned in his pale cheeks, as though some secret excitement sprang from the pages."

but there's a different kind of interest there.

"Kit would make sure that his eyes, blinking half blindly from his book, would focus on her gay, silk-clad figure nearby."

Eventually Kit decides that John is the victim of "an appallingly dull history," but as he's the only person on the ship who's willing to hang out with her, they strike up a friendship of sorts. Their conversation is essentially an ongoing culture clash. Kit is surprised John talks openly about his inability to afford Harvard tuition (though we get a hint of Kit's own money issues there), and John is scandalized that Kit's extensive reading has consisted almost entirely of books Puritans disapprove of. "There are no such books in Saybrook," he tells her.

These conversations also give Speare a chance to throw in some backstory, as Kit shares what she knows of the aunt she's on her way to live with.

"Her name is Rachel, and she was charming and gay, and they said she could have had her pick of any man in her father's regiment. But instead she fell in love with a Puritan and ran away to America without her father's blessing."

To which John suggests that, well, things are different in the colonies: "Kit was aware again of that intangible warning she could not interpret."

Returning for a moment to the subject of people avoiding each other on the ship: Nat Eaton is absent for all Kit's conversations with John, but eventually he decides to chat with her again -- which is not a success.

Kit complains about the lingering smell of horses, a reminder of the ship's previous cargo. Nat not only objects to any sort of criticism of the Dolphin, he also points out that the the alternative cargo was slaves, which he and his father aren't going to touch.

"Yes, to our shame! Mostly down Virginia way. But there are plenty of fine folk like you here in New England who'll pay a fat price for black flesh without asking any questions about how it got here. If my father would consent to bring back just one load of slaves we would have had our new ketch by this summer. But we Eatons, we're almighty proud that our ship has a good honest stink of horses!"

This is the first mention of Kit's attitude toward slavery, something that's going to appear several more times -- and it's an issue that's never actually dealt with over the course of the story.

And then they're in Wethersfield. Which, after all Kit's anticipation, is about what the reader expects:

"This was Wethersfield! Just a narrow sandy stretch of shoreline, a few piles sunk in the river with rough planking for a platform."

But there's a bigger problem, one that only emerges when Captain Eaton wonders why Kit's relatives haven't come to meet the ship: This whole moving-in-with-the-family thing wasn't actually a mutual decision. The Wood family has no idea their niece has left Barbados.

The captain's not too happy about this, grumbling about how he takes no responsibility for her. But Kit's bigger concern, as the captain drafts some of his men to carry her seven trunks to her uncle's house, is this:

"Why should Nat, who had carefully been somewhere else during the whole of the last nine days, have to be so handy at just this moment?"

Tidbit: The Many Faces of George Washington

2012-01-10T11:46:00.002-05:00

The Many Faces of George Washington, Carla Killough McClafferty. (Carolrhoda, 4/2011)

Gilbert Stuart's portraits of George Washington have left most Americans with a definite image of the first president: austere, dignified, and forever elderly. The Many Faces of George Washington tells the story of the team of historians and artists who have given the world new images of the icon.

The book follow the team's creation of three life-size statues of Washington that show him as a young surveyor, the famous general, and the first president. To build the figures, the team relies on everything from existing images to 3D skeletal models -- and, as the book's copious photo illustrations make clear, lots of painstaking - though fascinating -- work.

(Review copy provided by publisher; text shamelessly cribbed from my Cybils blurb.)

Chapter 1: We begin our journey

2012-01-04T09:53:00.000-05:00

The Witch of Blackbird Pond. One of my favorites, but it's not like I dug it out of a slush pile somewhere. Elizabeth George Speare won the 1959 Newbery Medal,¹ so I'm pretty sure the librarians thought it was rather good too.

So for this series, we're not just going to talk about the plot, we're going to look at what Speare did to make this the most distinguished book for children of its year.

(And then at the end we're going to look at what makes it a children's book in the first place, or what doesn't. Stay tuned.)

My plan is for these posts to go up every Wednesday, which means the discussion will last well into the warmer months,² but knowing my blogging habits, I'm not making any promises, y'know?

Onward.

Here's the opening line of the book:

"On a morning in mid-April, 1687, the brigantine Dolphin left the open sea, sailed briskly across the Sound to the wide mouth of the Connecticut River and into Saybrook harbor."

Speare wasn't playing the must-have-dramatic-hook line, but it's effective enough, since we're not left wondering about the where and when. It's historical fiction, and it's up-front about that.

We meet two characters straight off: protagonist Kit Tyler, and "Nathaniel Eaton, first mate, but his mother called him Nat."

Guess who's gonna play an important role in the story?

That's true for many of the characters introduced in the first few pages, but not all of them -- Mistress Eaton, for instance, leaves the ship at Wethersfield, and although she's mentioned in passing, she's never onstage again.

Speaking of Wethersfield:

"Kit hesitated. She didn't want to admit how disappointing she found this first glimpse of America."

I was a Connecticut girl for almost two decades. I love many things about the state. Beaches, however, are not something we do well. I expect that was even more true 300-plus years ago. However, we get a hint that things are not all bad in the New World:

"Kit glanced again at the forbidding shore. She could see nothing about it to put such a twinkle of anticipation in anyone's eye. Could there be some charm that was not visible from out here in the harbor?"

Once Kit is on dry land for the first time in five weeks, we get another first. Start counting the number of times "Sir Francis Tyler's granddaughter" shows up in the text.

"Embarrassment was a new sensation for Kit. No one on the island had ever presumed to stare like that at Sir Francis Tyler's granddaughter."

Kit's left her home of Barbados for a country where, to the best of her knowledge, no one has even heard of Sir Francis Tyler, but she completely defines herself through her paternal lineage. Which is sure to go over well when she moves in with her mother's relatives, no?

In the course of returning to the boat, Kit manages to get herself in a bit of trouble by jumping overboard to rescue the doll dropped by her fellow passenger Prudence Cruff. Prudence's mother, Goodwife Cruff, doesn't much want anyone getting in the way of her child-rearing (otherwise known as child abuse), and all the New Englanders are put out to see that Kit not only acts on her own when both the captain and Goodwife Cruff are willing to abandon the doll, but also swims. Which at least some of them consider evidence of witchcraft.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call "foreshadowing."

Before the chapter ends, we meet one more key character: "I am John Holbrook, bound for Wethersfield, which I learn is your destination as well."

We'll learn more about John as the story progresses, but that first line gives a fairly good picture of him. Yes, Kit was first drawn to him because he smiled at her when everyone else was glaring, but there's a certain -- stiffness? stodginess? something -- about him.

John and Kit have a bit of an argument about the relative merits of Barbados and Puritanism, and we get another glimpse of how just maybe Kit doesn't know what she's gotten herself into.

¹ For everyone keeping track, this was Speare's first win. She also got the medal in 1962 for The Bronze Bow, and took a silver sticker in 1984 for The Sign of the Beaver.
² The problem with leaving WBUR on all day at the store was the number of times we had to listen to the anchor inform us that today's weather was "bitterly cold." Yes, it was.³
³ Shut up, Midwesterners. For us soft New England urbanites, it totally was.

Chapter 38: Life Moves On

2011-12-30T11:51:00.000-05:00

Anne quickly realizes that she can't leave Marilla alone -- which is a problem, since she was planning to head off to Redmond College.

"He says that if I give up all reading and sewing entirely and any kind of work that strains the eyes, and if I'm careful not to cry, and if I wear the glasses he's given me he thinks my eyes may not get any worse and my headaches will be cured. But if I don't he says I'll certainly be stone-blind in six months."

So she decides to stay home, and get a teaching job on the island.

"I'm just as ambitious as ever. Only, I've changed the object of my ambitions."

And go to school. Overachiever.

"'But I'm going to study Latin and Greek just the same, Mrs. Lynde," said Anne laughing. "I'm going to take my Arts course right here at Green Gables, and study everything that I would at college.'"

She's planning on teaching in a school near Avonlea, and getting home on the weekends -- but Gilbert Blythe has other plans, as Rachel Lynde is happy to inform everyone.

"But as soon as Gilbert heard that you had applied for it he went to them—they had a business meeting at the school last night, you know—and told them that he withdrew his application, and suggested that they accept yours."

Which is something Anne was hardly expecting. And that's what it takes for her to remove her head from somewhere unmentionable and do something about their relationship.

"It was Gilbert, and the whistle died on his lips as he recognized Anne. He lifted his cap courteously, but he would have passed on in silence, if Anne had not stopped and held out her hand."

"I forgave you that day by the pond landing, although I didn't know it. What a stubborn little goose I was. I've been—I may as well make a complete confession—I've been sorry ever since."

"We were born to be good friends, Anne."

All together, now: sigh.

Chapter 37: Handkerchiefs at the Ready

2011-12-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, this chapter? Sob central.

Matthew dies, people. Matthew dies.

"It was long before Anne could love the sight or odor of white narcissus again"

And deservedly so.

The thing is, I like Kevin Sullivan's version of this much better. Montgomery has Matthew collapsing after receiving word that all his savings have been wiped out. That just seems too -- I don't know, prosaic, maybe? As opposed to the movie version, where Matthew just goes on as he always has, quietly working the farm and taking care of Anne, right up to the end.

Cue the sobs:

"For the first time shy, quiet Matthew Cuthbert was a person of central importance; the white majesty of death had fallen on him and set him apart as one crowned."

"There were flowers about him—sweet old-fashioned flowers which his mother had planted in the homestead garden in her bridal days and for which Matthew had always had a secret, wordless love."

"Anne hoped that the tears would come in solitude."

And now that she's all alone except for Anne, the last bit of Marilla's reserve cracks, and she admits how much she really cares.

"'We've got each other, Anne. I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here—if you'd never come. Oh, Anne, I know I've been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe—but you mustn't think I didn't love you as well as Matthew did, for all that. I want to tell you now when I can. It's never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but at times like this it's easier. I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you've been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.'"

But then slowly, eventually, they can begin to think of other things. And some of them are quite funny:

"'Josie is a Pye,' said Marilla sharply, 'so she can't help being disagreeable. I suppose people of that kind serve some useful purpose in society, but I must say I don't know what it is any more than I know the use of thistles. Is Josie going to teach?'"

And some are surprising, adding a whole new dimension to the not-romance between Anne and Gilbert.

"John Blythe was a nice boy. We used to be real good friends, he and I. People called him my beau."

But, oh, Matthew. Sigh.

Chapter 36: Stage-Setting

2011-12-28T11:45:00.000-05:00

Something pretty monumental happens to Anne in this chapter: She wins the Avery Scholarship, which will cover her tuition for a bachelor's degree at Redmond College. (Queens just offers a teaching certificate, which Anne finished up in one year.)

So things are good. And the school year's over, which means Anne's back at Green Gables, where she belongs.

Cue the impending doom soundtrack.

Look, if you've read the book, you know what's coming. So let's just look at a couple of the lines Montgomery uses to set us up for the next chapter.

"'Reckon you're glad we kept her, Marilla?' whispered Matthew, speaking for the first time since he had entered the hall, when Anne had finished her essay."

"'Marilla," she said hesitatingly when he had gone out, "is Matthew quite well?'"

"'If I had been the boy you sent for,' said Anne wistfully, 'I'd be able to help you so much now and spare you in a hundred ways. I could find it in my heart to wish I had been, just for that.'"

"It's only that I'm getting old, Anne, and keep forgetting it."

"It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it."

Chapter 35: Guess Who Takes Center Stage

2011-12-27T11:42:00.000-05:00

This is a short chapter, and it's very much about one person who's suddenly on Anne's mind quite a lot.

"She could not help thinking, too, that it would be very pleasant to have such a friend as Gilbert to jest and chatter with and exchange ideas about books and studies and ambitions. Gilbert had ambitions, she knew, and Ruby Gillis did not seem the sort of person with whom such could be profitably discussed."

Montgomery makes a point of emphasizing that this isn't a romance; Anne's got her own ideas about that, and Gilbert still doesn't make the cut. But she's not looking for romance right now.

"There was no silly sentiment in Anne's ideas concerning Gilbert. Boys were to her, when she thought about them at all, merely possible good comrades. If she and Gilbert had been friends she would not have cared how many other friends he had nor with whom he walked. She had a genius for friendship; girl friends she had in plenty; but she had a vague consciousness that masculine friendship might also be a good thing to round out one's conceptions of companionship and furnish broader standpoints of judgment and comparison."

And as a result, she's gotten just a bit more down-to-earth about her academic pursuits.

"Anne no longer wished to win for the sake of defeating Gilbert; rather, for the proud consciousness of a well-won victory over a worthy foeman. It would be worth while to win, but she no longer thought life would be insupportable if she did not."

Chapter 34: Leaving Home

2011-12-26T11:38:00.000-05:00

Anne heads off to college in this chapter, a big moment for both her and Marilla and Matthew.

Marilla even verges on indulgence:

"Anne's outfit was ample and pretty, for Matthew saw to that, and Marilla for once made no objections whatever to anything he purchased or suggested. More—one evening she went up to the east gable with her arms full of a delicate pale green material."

And is it just me, or are tears starting to be a regular thing for her?

"As Marilla watched the bright, animated face and graceful motions her thoughts went back to the evening Anne had arrived at Green Gables, and memory recalled a vivid picture of the odd, frightened child in her preposterous yellowish-brown wincey dress, the heartbreak looking out of her tearful eyes. Something in the memory brought tears to Marilla's own eyes."

And then Anne leaves, and Marilla and Matthew each deal with it in their own way.

"Matthew, with a suspicious moisture in his eyes, got up and went out-of-doors. Under the stars of the blue summer night he walked agitatedly across the yard to the gate under the poplars."

"Marilla plunged fiercely into unnecessary work and kept at it all day long with the bitterest kind of heartache—the ache that burns and gnaws and cannot wash itself away in ready tears"

Gilbert proves useful after all, even if he and Anne don't have much of a speaking relationship.

"Yet she was undeniably glad that they were in the same class; the old rivalry could still be carried on, and Anne would hardly have known what to do if it had been lacking."

As does Josie Pye, who's never been one of Anne's favorite people.

"As a part of Avonlea life even a Pye was welcome."

But that doesn't last long.

"Anne was wondering if, after all, solitude and tears were not more satisfactory than Josie Pye's companionship"

Chapter 33: The Big Concert

2011-12-24T11:34:00.000-05:00

Now that Anne's done with school, having passed the exam even to her satisfaction, it's time for a little play. She's one of the local girls invited to participate in a benefit concert.

"Matthew was in the seventh heaven of gratified pride over the honor conferred on his Anne and Marilla was not far behind, although she would have died rather than admit it, and said she didn't think it was very proper for a lot of young folks to be gadding over to the hotel without any responsible person with them."

She ends up riding over to White Sands with Jane Andrews and Jane's older brother, which is not something Anne sees as one of the positive aspects of the evening.

"Billy Andrews insisted that Anne should ride on the front seat with him, so she unwillingly climbed up. She would have much preferred to sit back with the girls, where she could have laughed and chattered to her heart's content. There was not much of either laughter or chatter in Billy. He was a big, fat, stolid youth of twenty, with a round, expressionless face, and a painful lack of conversational gifts. But he admired Anne immensely, and was puffed up with pride over the prospect of driving to White Sands with that slim, upright figure beside him."

Anne has her moment, though, giving a performance that impresses everyone who was there to mock the simple country girls -- all thanks to another misunderstanding with her favorite male:

"But suddenly, as her dilated, frightened eyes gazed out over the audience, she saw Gilbert Blythe away at the back of the room, bending forward with a smile on his face—a smile which seemed to Anne at once triumphant and taunting. In reality it was nothing of the kind. Gilbert was merely smiling with appreciation of the whole affair in general and of the effect produced by Anne's slender white form and spiritual face against a background of palms in particular."

So how much longer are we going to have to wait for their reconciliation? Well, we've got five more chapters to get through.

And we close with a philosophical moment:

"'We ARE rich,' said Anne staunchly. 'Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we're happy as queens, and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls—all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds. You wouldn't change into any of those women if you could. Would you want to be that white-lace girl and wear a sour look all your life, as if you'd been born turning up your nose at the world? Or the pink lady, kind and nice as she is, so stout and short that you'd really no figure at all? Or even Mrs. Evans, with that sad, sad look in her eyes? She must have been dreadfully unhappy sometime to have such a look. You KNOW you wouldn't, Jane Andrews!'"

Chapter 32: The Big Exam

2011-12-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

So Avonlea's students go off to take their version of the SATs. Just like the SATs, the Queens test will clearly determine their worth as humans and all their future possibilities, so nerves are appropriately on edge.

"Jane asked him what on earth he was doing and he said he was repeating the multiplication table over and over to steady his nerves and for pity's sake not to interrupt him, because if he stopped for a moment he got frightened and forgot everything he ever knew, but the multiplication table kept all his facts firmly in their proper place!"

The "he" in the previous sentence is Moody Spurgeon McPherson, and I'm left wondering what this kid did to make himself so unpopular.

"Sometimes I have wished I was born a boy, but when I see Moody Spurgeon I'm always glad I'm a girl and not his sister."

Is it just the fact that he's not on the same level as Anne? I feel kind of bad for him, but who knows? He might be the sort who's just too generally irritating to want to spend time with.

Gilbert Blythe is not that sort, but that doesn't mean that he and Anne have improved the state of their relations any.

"They had met and passed each other on the street a dozen times without any sign of recognition and every time Anne had held her head a little higher and wished a little more earnestly that she had made friends with Gilbert when he asked her, and vowed a little more determinedly to surpass him in the examination."

As we all remember, she does not, of course, surpass him. They tie for first. But I think Kevin Sullivan had it right, shifting things around in the movie so Gilbert's the one who gives her the news.

Chapter 31: In Which We Cite Longfellow

2011-12-22T10:55:00.000-05:00

In the chapter title, at least. Per the ever-amazing Annotated Anne, "where the brook and river meet" is a line from his poem "Maidenhood."

The Queens exam is still hanging over Anne, but she's trying not to let it get to her.

First we have a foray into the question of appropriate professions for women:

"Why can't women be ministers, Marilla? I asked Mrs. Lynde that and she was shocked and said it would be a scandalous thing. She said there might be female ministers in the States and she believed there was, but thank goodness we hadn't got to that stage in Canada yet and she hoped we never would. But I don't see why. I think women would make splendid ministers."

Which gives me an opportunity to go all history-nerd on you and make sure you know who Antoinette Brown was. And check out the family this woman married into - one of her sisters-in-law was Elizabeth Blackwell, the first professional female doctor in the U.S. (and another sister-in-law, Emily Blackwell, also became a doctor), and another was Lucy Stone, famous for not changing her last name when she married. This is why I want to write about the Blackwell family!

Speaking of people who went their own way, we get a quick look at why Miss Stacy was such a great teacher:

"Much of all this was due to Miss Stacy's tactful, careful, broadminded guidance. She led her class to think and explore and discover for themselves and encouraged straying from the old beaten paths to a degree that quite shocked Mrs. Lynde and the school trustees, who viewed all innovations on established methods rather dubiously."

The other thing we get in this chapter, which covers the better part of a year in not a whole lot of words, is a glimpse of Marilla finally giving in to her human side.

"And that night, when Anne had gone to prayer meeting with Diana, Marilla sat alone in the wintry twilight and indulged in the weakness of a cry."

It's not much. She still thinks of it as a weakness, an indulgence, and I can't imagine her actually crying in front of Anne at this point -- but can you imagine the Marilla of Chapter 1 even considering the possibility that she might allow a tear to escape?

Chapter 30: College Prep

2011-12-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

If you don't already adore Marilla, this chapter should win you over. How can you not want to give her a hug (one that would be totally unwanted by her) when you see how vulnerable she is?

"Marilla looked at her with a tenderness that would never have been suffered to reveal itself in any clearer light than that soft mingling of fireshine and shadow. The lesson of a love that should display itself easily in spoken word and open look was one Marilla could never learn. But she had learned to love this slim, gray-eyed girl with an affection all the deeper and stronger from its very undemonstrativeness. Her love made her afraid of being unduly indulgent, indeed."

And as Marilla's busy not telling Anne that she loves her, Anne's making progress toward leaving home for the first time. She's part of the Queens class, the students who are doing extra work to prepare for the entrance exam for Queens College.

Which gives her competitive side an opportunity to shine.

"There was open rivalry between Gilbert and Anne now. Previously the rivalry had been rather onesided, but there was no longer any doubt that Gilbert was as determined to be first in class as Anne was. He was a foeman worthy of her steel. The other members of the class tacitly acknowledged their superiority, and never dreamed of trying to compete with them."

Except when it doesn't.

"All at once, as it seemed, and to her secret dismay, she found that the old resentment she had cherished against him was gone—gone just when she most needed its sustaining power. It was in vain that she recalled every incident and emotion of that memorable occasion and tried to feel the old satisfying anger. That day by the pond had witnessed its last spasmodic flicker. Anne realized that she had forgiven and forgotten without knowing it. But it was too late."

Chapter 29: A Visit

2011-12-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

Anne, accompanied by Diana, makes a brief visit to Miss Josephine Barry's house. The narrator makes sure we understand that this is not exactly a moment of altruism.

"Miss Barry was a rather selfish old lady, if the truth must be told, and had never cared much for anybody but herself. She valued people only as they were of service to her or amused her. Anne had amused her, and consequently stood high in the old lady's good graces. But Miss Barry found herself thinking less about Anne's quaint speeches than of her fresh enthusiasms, her transparent emotions, her little winning ways, and the sweetness of her eyes and lips."

This is a growing-up chapter for Anne. It's not plot-heavy, and she's not learning any important lessons here; she's just demonstrating the maturity she's already accumulated. For instance:

"Josie Pye took first prize for knitted lace. I was real glad she did. And I was glad that I felt glad, for it shows I'm improving, don't you think, Marilla, when I can rejoice in Josie's success?"

And:

"It was an elegant room, Marilla, but somehow sleeping in a spare room isn't what I used to think it was. That's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them."

Even city life isn't tempting to Anne:

"It's nice to be eating ice cream at brilliant restaurants at eleven o'clock at night once in a while; but as a regular thing I'd rather be in the east gable at eleven, sound asleep, but kind of knowing even in my sleep that the stars were shining outside and that the wind was blowing in the firs across the brook."

Which Marilla is glad to hear. This is the closest she comes to admitting that she misses Anne when Anne's away.

"I'm glad you've got back, I must say. It's been fearful lonesome here without you, and I never put in four longer days."

Coming from Marilla, those are some pretty emotional words.

Chapter 28: The Lady of the Lake

2011-12-19T10:40:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm mixing Arthurian legends here. Deal.

Fun fact, from Montgomery's journal via the Annotated Anne: Montgomery was not the fan of Tennyson's poem that she made Anne out to be: "I detest Tennyson's Arthur! If I'd been Guinevere I'd have been unfaithful to him too."

This, of course, is when the girls decide to act out the poem. And even though Anne doesn't plan to star in the drama (because a red-haired Elaine is too ridiculous to consider), she ends up in the boat anyway.

"It was Anne's idea that they dramatize Elaine. They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot. Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present."

Slight problem: the water is supposed to remain outside the boat. And it doesn't.

Which gives Gilbert a chance to rescue the now-stranded Anne.

"Without waiting for an answer he pulled close to the pile and extended his hand. There was no help for it; Anne, clinging to Gilbert Blythe's hand, scrambled down into the dory, where she sat, drabbled and furious, in the stern with her arms full of dripping shawl and wet crepe. It was certainly extremely difficult to be dignified under the circumstances!"

And he thinks it gives him an opening:

"'Anne,' he said hurriedly, 'look here. Can't we be good friends? I'm awfully sorry I made fun of your hair that time. I didn't mean to vex you and I only meant it for a joke. Besides, it's so long ago. I think your hair is awfully pretty now—honest I do. Let's be friends.'"

Not so much:

"Her resentment, which to other and older people might be as laughable as its cause, was in no whit allayed and softened by time seemingly."

Which, of course, no one else can understand.

"'Oh, Anne, how splendid of him! Why, it's so romantic!' said Jane, finding breath enough for utterance at last. 'Of course you'll speak to him after this.'"

Jane very narrowly avoids getting smacked over that, while the reader quite probably wants to shake some sense into Anne. Girl, there is not exactly an oversupply of eligible young men with a sense of romance in Avonlea -- or most other places.

Chapter 27: Oh, the hair!

2011-11-03T10:36:00.000-04:00

But first, a bit of insight into Marilla's thought process:

"Marilla was not given to subjective analysis of her thoughts and feelings. She probably imagined that she was thinking about the Aids and their missionary box and the new carpet for the vestry room, but under these reflections was a harmonious consciousness of red fields smoking into pale-purply mists in the declining sun, of long, sharp-pointed fir shadows falling over the meadow beyond the brook, of still, crimson-budded maples around a mirrorlike wood pool, of a wakening in the world and a stir of hidden pulses under the gray sod."

And, while we're at it, Matthew's:

"Matthew, who, being patient and wise and, above all, hungry, had deemed it best to let Marilla talk her wrath out unhindered, having learned by experience that she got through with whatever work was on hand much quicker if not delayed by untimely argument"

That aside, let's talk about the disaster that results when Anne tries to dye her hair black:

"Green it might be called, if it were any earthly color—a queer, dull, bronzy green, with streaks here and there of the original red to heighten the ghastly effect. Never in all her life had Marilla seen anything so grotesque as Anne's hair at that moment."

(For the record, when I was just a bit older than Anne, I dyed my brown hair reddish-brown. It wasn't actually a big change from my natural color. But I was sure the box said that the dye washed out after 6 weeks. Which it did not. And as my hair started to grow out, the difference between the two colors was just substantial enough that I spent several months with a subtle stripe across the back of my head.)

Oh, wait, it's an excuse for Marilla's xenophobia to make another appearance:

"Anne Shirley, how often have I told you never to let one of those Italians in the house! I don't believe in encouraging them to come around at all."
...
"Besides, he wasn't an Italian—he was a German Jew. He had a big box full of very interesting things and he told me he was working hard to make enough money to bring his wife and children out from Germany."

Onward, Anne, even without your formerly lovely long hair.

Tidbit: Crow

2011-11-02T17:54:00.000-04:00

Crow, Barbara Wright. (Random House, 1/10/12)

A common complaint in the kidlit world: historical fiction with African-American characters is pretty much slavery and the civil rights movement, with very little attention paid to the century in between.

Attention is being paid, and it's worth it.

The main character here is a generation removed from slavery -- it's hardly forgotten, but it's not what defines him. We've got issues of upward mobility, the clash between tradition and modernity, and the post-Reconstruction backlash.

(ARC provided by publisher.)

Tidbit: Bigger than a Breadbox

2011-11-01T17:44:00.002-04:00

Bigger than a Breadbox, Laurel Snyder. (Random House, 9/27/11)

This is not a review. It's totally an endorsement. And a biased one, because not only is Laurel a fabulous person¹, she's one of the few Twitter/blogging/online friends I've actually met.

That said: This is an excellent book. The story moves along, things are developing, there's all kinds of complexity -- and then there's a didn't-see-that-coming emotional punch at the end.²

(Advance copy provided by publisher.)

¹ Bonus points to everyone who caught the Troop Beverley Hills reference there.
² And I am not easily impressed by endings. Ask me sometime about The Usual Suspects.

Tidbit: How to Save a Life

2011-09-17T17:39:00.000-04:00

How to Save a Life, Sara Zarr. (LBYR, 10/18/11)

Proof that you can write a damn good YA novel that clocks in below 300 pages.

And unlike some other books,¹ the flawed characters are ultimately endearing, not the kind that make you want to throw the book away and give up on them.

Somehow HTSAL even left me thinking good thoughts about a guy who wears eyeliner (but don't get any ideas).

(Review copy provided by publisher)

¹ I will not name names. I will not name names.

Tidbit: The Maid

2011-09-16T11:54:00.002-04:00

The Maid, Kimberly Cutter. (HMH, 10/18/2011)

This is a book about Joan of Arc -- fair to say it's a story that's been done before, just a few times. I went into it knowing how things were going to turn out. So when I tell you that I was so engrossed in the last third of The Maid that I forgot I was supposed to be looking for Colleen and made her go searching all over the museum grounds for me, you get what I'm saying, no?

Knowing that Joan was going to win her big battle, knowing that the Dauphin was totally going to abandon her, knowing the outcome of the trial, I still had to find out how Cutter's version of it was going to happen.

(Advance copy provided by publisher)

New feature: tidbits

2011-09-16T11:24:00.004-04:00

After months of telling people that I don't review new releases here, I'm suddenly a bookseller again. Which means I need to read a lot of new releases, and have something intelligent to say about them.

And it's way easier to do that here at Archimedes Forgets than keeping track of everything myself.

But the thing is, I don't review because I'm bad at it. I can do a passable job of telling you why to read something I like, but I'm just no good at analyzing why it works, or anything like that. And I can assure you that phrases like "luminous prose" are not going to start popping up here.

So I think it's time for a new feature here: tidbits. Consider them virtual shelftalkers, if you like; you might see some of them appearing on paper at the bookstore.

From Bob Edwards to Alexander Hamilton, with a rant in between

2011-09-13T10:08:00.005-04:00

I made a mistake last night. I was supposed to go to bed when I set down Bob Edwards' A Voice in the Box, not scroll through Twitter and click on infuriating links.

Especially not when I'd just gotten to the dumped-by-Morning-Edition section of A Voice, which is seething with controlled fury. So that may have shaped my reaction to "Six Ways Amazon Book Streaming Could Help Small Business."

Maybe. Just a bit.¹ Vlad's a smart guy.² And it's morning now, and I still think it's a dumb article.

First, it's total SEO-bait. The headline calls out small-biz benefits, but the article doesn't actually make the case for any.

Item 1: "We're going to take a leap of faith here and assume that what Amazon is offering goes beyond the usual Project Gutenberg titles that every e-book reader and service has made available for free, since they will need to do so to attract subscribers to their service."

"the usual Project Gutenberg titles" -- nitpicky it may be, but this phrase grates on me. The works in question are mostly public domain titles. Because their copyrights have expired,³ these documents are often available for free in digital format,⁴ or in a variety of formats from any publisher who cares to put them out.⁵
"need to do so to attract subscribers" -- I'll be curious to see what percentage of new Prime customers sign up for the service because of streaming book access.

Item 2: "Google Books is Not Enough."

Maybe the service should claim this as its tagline, with all the current and former James Bonds doing voiceovers.

Item 3: "which is still a big 'if' at this point"

In fact, it's a huge if. Everything in this article is speculation, and a whole lot more verbs should be in the subjunctive mood.

Item 4: "To obtain e-books from Amazon right now, you must go to Amazon’s website, search for what you want, and download it. If Amazon’s purported service does it right, you’ll be able to tap an app on your smartphone or their forthcoming tablet and stream a book directly to your device."

Which is pretty much what you can do with the Kindle app on any of these platforms, no? The key difference between the-way-things-are and the-way-things-might-be is that in the latter case, there would be no payment component to the transaction -- something the article overlooks.

Item 5: "Streaming Model May Bring Down Price Points."

No, you know what? I give up. It's not worth it, and I don't want to spend any more time on this.⁶ I could have been writing a post on Alexander Hamilton instead.⁷

¹ Standard disclaimer applies: I'm an indie bookseller, a fan of indie bookstores, and a former employee of their trade association. So my perspective on who these moves are likely to help is neither unbiased nor disinterested.

² For reference.

³ Or, in the case of government documents, they're simply public domain.

⁴ Except for the many $0.99 versions. Why? If you're going to spend the money, get a good annotated edition!

⁵ Which is why we were subjected to the Everything and Zombies nonsense two years ago.

⁶ Plus, the month is still young, and I don't want to waste my one officially-sanctioned outrage just yet.

⁷ TK soon. Preview here and here.

Chapter 26: Anne gets her writer on

2011-09-12T11:35:00.000-04:00

The concert has passed, but its touch lingers in Avonlea. There's Anne's take:

"Perhaps after a while I'll get used to it, but I'm afraid concerts spoil people for everyday life. I suppose that is why Marilla disapproves of them. Marilla is such a sensible woman. It must be a great deal better to be sensible; but still, I don't believe I'd really want to be a sensible person, because they are so unromantic."

And the wider repercussions:

"To be sure, the concert left traces. Ruby Gillis and Emma White, who had quarreled over a point of precedence in their platform seats, no longer sat at the same desk, and a promising friendship of three years was broken up. Josie Pye and Julia Bell did not 'speak' for three months, because Josie Pye had told Bessie Wright that Julia Bell's bow when she got up to recite made her think of a chicken jerking its head, and Bessie told Julia. None of the Sloanes would have any dealings with the Bells, because the Bells had declared that the Sloanes had too much to do in the program, and the Sloanes had retorted that the Bells were not capable of doing the little they had to do properly. Finally, Charlie Sloane fought Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, because Moody Spurgeon had said that Anne Shirley put on airs about her recitations, and Moody Spurgeon was 'licked'; consequently Moody Spurgeon's sister, Ella May, would not 'speak' to Anne Shirley all the rest of the winter. With the exception of these trifling frictions, work in Miss Stacy's little kingdom went on with regularity and smoothness."

Shall we count the elements of awesome in that passage?

All the schoolroom drama
The quotes around "speak," because anyone who's been a preteen girl knows that not speaking to someone is not the same think as not "speaking" to them.
The fact that a minor battle was fought over Anne's honor (and she can even cherish the romanticism of it, because Gilbert wasn't involved!)

Incidentally, Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, who's just about always referred to by both his first names, is the namesake of notable nineteenth-century ministers Dwight Moody and Charles Spurgeon. (In a couple chapters, we'll see Mrs. Rachel make a point of that.)

Now that it's time to sort out post-concert life, Anne decides it's the right moment to get up a story club with the other girls. There's some fun stuff in there, but one line from Anne gives you the Cliffs Notes version of the club:

"Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died. But I'm glad Miss Barry liked them."

Raise your hand if you wrote stories like that as a kid!

Chapter 25: Matthew discovers fashion

2011-09-05T16:58:00.000-04:00

"Matthew was having a bad ten minutes of it."

Poor man. Not just because he's hiding from a gaggle of girls who have taken over his house, but because of the adventure he's about to embark on.

As he sits there wondering how long he's going to have to wait before the giggling mass of hormones moves on, he figures out something that Marilla hasn't yet considered worthy of attention:

"The more Matthew thought about the matter the more he was convinced that Anne never had been dressed like the other girls—never since she had come to Green Gables. Marilla kept her clothed in plain, dark dresses, all made after the same unvarying pattern. If Matthew knew there was such a thing as fashion in dress it was as much as he did; but he was quite sure that Anne's sleeves did not look at all like the sleeves the other girls wore."

And he knows better than to talk to Marilla about it. So instead, he girds his loins and sets out on the difficult task of being a sixty-something bachelor buying a dress for the first time.

He's so uncomfortable with the idea that he doesn't even go to his usual store:

"To be sure, the Cuthberts always had gone to William Blair's; it was almost as much a matter of conscience with them as to attend the Presbyterian church and vote Conservative."

But he can't get away from the estrogen, since he's waited on by a female clerk.

"Matthew was covered with confusion at finding her there at all; and those bangles completely wrecked his wits at one fell swoop."

He ends up with no dress, and twenty pounds of brown sugar.

"It had been a gruesome experience, but it served him right, he thought, for committing the heresy of going to a strange store."

And of course, he's still not telling Marilla a thing, so she's left to rant about the brown sugar and show her disdain for the hired help once again:

"You know I never use it except for the hired man's porridge or black fruit cake. Jerry's gone and I've made my cake long ago."

Matthew finally solves the problem by going to Rachel Lynde, who thoroughly approves:

"That man is waking up after being asleep for over sixty years."

and secretly makes up a dress for Anne. Naturally, transports of delight follow.

Anne wears the dress to the school recital, to much acclaim -- and, Diana points out, some special attention:

"Wait till I tell you. When you ran off the platform after the fairy dialogue one of your roses fell out of your hair. I saw Gil pick it up and put it in his breast pocket. There now. You're so romantic that I'm sure you ought to be pleased at that."

Who wants to bet on that?

Chapter 24: Miss Stacy

2011-08-25T08:36:00.001-04:00

It's time to welcome one of the most awesome adult characters in Anne of Green Gables: Miss Stacy. (Points to Kevin Sullivan for giving her a more expanded role in the movies!)

Avonlea's new teacher scores points with Anne straight off:

"When she pronounces my name I feel INSTINCTIVELY that she's spelling it with an E."

But Miss Stacy's not held in quite such high esteem by the senior residents of Avonlea, who look somewhat askance at all the new innovations she introduces into the curriculum. Nature studies, "physical culture exercises," and concerts step a bit outside the 3 R's, y'know?

The concert is given "for the laudable purpose of helping to pay for a schoolhouse flag," and The Annotated Anne speculates that this might be a brand new Canadian flag, since the Dominion of Canada had only recently been formed.

Marilla has nothing against inculcating a spirit of patriotism in young Canadians, but she's pretty sure that's just an excuse for dressing up and staying out late.

"All I hope is that you'll behave yourself. I'll be heartily glad when all this fuss is over and you'll be able to settle down. You are simply good for nothing just now with your head stuffed full of dialogues and groans and tableaus. As for your tongue, it's a marvel it's not clean worn out."

Matthew, of course, thinks it's great. Because anything that makes Anne happy is great. Which prompts a lovely narrative aside:

"Those two were the best of friends and Matthew thanked his stars many a time and oft that he had nothing to do with bringing her up. That was Marilla's exclusive duty; if it had been his he would have been worried over frequent conflicts between inclination and said duty."

Poor Marilla, always having to be the grownup!

(~~Post pic borrowed from here~~, as the most likely one displayed at the school. I plead guilty to being a dumb American; I didn't realize the maple leaf was a quite recent invention.)

[Update: So close! book lovin' Ontarian pointed out that the original pic was a later iteration of the red ensign.]

Chapter 23: Balance skills

2011-08-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

Montgomery sets up this chapter by letting us know that it's time for Anne to get into some mischief again:

"Almost a month having elapsed since the liniment cake episode, it was high time for her to get into fresh trouble of some sort, little mistakes, such as absentmindedly emptying a pan of skim milk into a basket of yarn balls in the pantry instead of into the pigs' bucket, and walking clean over the edge of the log bridge into the brook while wrapped in imaginative reverie, not really being worth counting."

Yeah, not much happening there.

But, just like in The Christmas Story, that whole holding-your-head-up thing makes life complicated. Especially when Josie Pye is the one making the dare -- in this case, daring Anne to walk the ridgepole.

Only it turns out Anne's ability to balance is not quite on the level of her ability to taunt Josie, and she ends up falling off the roof.

Now it might be tempting to make fun of Diana's reaction to Anne's fall:

"Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed."

But just consider the response:

"No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious."

Which obviously is not the case. So they gather Anne up and carry her back to Green Gables, provoking one of Marilla's pivotal moments in the book:

"At that moment Marilla had a revelation. In the sudden stab of fear that pierced her very heart she realized what Anne had come to mean to her. She would have admitted that she liked Anne—nay, that she was very fond of Anne. But now she knew as she hurried wildly down the slope that Anne was dearer to her than anything else on earth."

Chapter 22: What's better than asking a friend to tea?

2011-08-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

Being asked to tea by the new minister's wife.

Among other things, it signals that all has been forgiven after the anodyne cake incident. Phew.

Also, no one gets drunk when Mrs. Allan is the hostess.

This is another vignette/not-much-plot chapter. What we get to see is a snippet of Anne growing up -- a little bit.

"That is the first time I was ever called 'Miss.' Such a thrill as it gave me!"
...
"For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature."
...
"Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was."

By the way, the two poetic allusions in this chapter show both how effectively Anne has spread through the world, and also how well Montgomery knew her stuff. A quick Google search for "spirit and fire and dew" (Robert Browning) and "deeps of affliction" (John Owen) turn up just as many pages about the book as references to the originals.

Chapter 21: Ew

2011-08-14T10:12:00.000-04:00

Avonlea acquires a new minister, and it's quite the small-town event:

"If Marilla, in going down to Mrs. Lynde's that evening, was actuated by any motive save her avowed one of returning the quilting frames she had borrowed the preceding winter, it was an amiable weakness shared by most of the Avonlea people. Many a thing Mrs. Lynde had lent, sometimes never expecting to see it again, came home that night in charge of the borrowers thereof. A new minister, and moreover a minister with a wife, was a lawful object of curiosity in a quiet little country settlement where sensations were few and far between."

I love it when Montgomery goes all dry-humor on us.

Anne, of course, was not left out of the process while the church decided which minister to call:

"These stood or fell by the judgment of the fathers and mothers in Israel; but a certain small, red-haired girl who sat meekly in the corner of the old Cuthbert pew also had her opinions about them and discussed the same in full with Matthew, Marilla always declining from principle to criticize ministers in any shape or form."

Part of the event nature of the minister's arrival is the obligation of every respectable family to invite him and his wife to their homes. Naturally, Anne is the one to feel the pressure.

"It's such a responsibility having a minister's family to tea."

And she subtly adds her own tweaks to Marilla's tea:

"'Mrs. Barry had HER table decorated,' said Anne, who was not entirely guiltless of the wisdom of the serpent, 'and the minister paid her an elegant compliment. He said it was a feast for the eye as well as the palate.'"

And not so subtly:

"Mercy on us, Anne, you've flavored that cake with ANODYNE LINIMENT. I broke the liniment bottle last week and poured what was left into an old empty vanilla bottle. I suppose it's partly my fault—I should have warned you—but for pity's sake why couldn't you have smelled it?"

No one was injured, of course.

"It's meant to be taken internally—although not in cakes."

Which doesn't mean the cake was a successful part of the meal.

"'Well, you'd better go and give that cake to the pigs,' said Marilla. 'It isn't fit for any human to eat, not even Jerry Boute.'"

Yup, couldn't let another chapter pass without getting in a dig at the help. Ah, well. Onward, Marilla!

Chapter 20: In which imagination gets out of control

2011-08-13T10:09:00.001-04:00

Not much happens in this chapter; it's more of a vignette that demonstrates that Anne is still Anne -- in this case, because she totally lets her imagination get the better of her in the matter of the Haunted Wood.

Besides that, we get a look at Avonlea childhood customs:

"Charlie Sloane dared Arty Gillis to jump over it, and Arty did because he wouldn't take a dare. Nobody would in school. It is very FASHIONABLE to dare."

And the use of questionable verbs:

"After the Mayflowers came the violets, and Violet Vale was empurpled with them."

And a look at how Anne's bedroom has changed:

"In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged. The walls were as white, the pincushion as hard, the chairs as stiffly and yellowly upright as ever. Yet the whole character of the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing personality that seemed to pervade it and to be quite independent of schoolgirl books and dresses and ribbons, and even of the cracked blue jug full of apple blossoms on the table. It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine."

And a sign of how Marilla has changed:

"'No, I can't say I'm sorry,' said Marilla, who sometimes wondered how she could have lived before Anne came to Green Gables, 'no, not exactly sorry. If you've finished your lessons, Anne, I want you to run over and ask Mrs. Barry if she'll lend me Diana's apron pattern.'"

(Post pic: Obviously, live oaks and Spanish moss are not among the flora of Prince Edward Island. But can you think of anything that is more mood-setting in a picture of woods?)

Chapter 19: Lessons are learned

2011-08-12T10:06:00.000-04:00

Lesson 1: It doesn't matter how careful you are with your special communication system, grownups are going to object.

"We have arranged a way to signal with our candles and cardboard. We set the candle on the window sill and make flashes by passing the cardboard back and forth. So many flashes mean a certain thing. It was my idea, Marilla."

Lesson 2: When designing said communication system, make sure the code meshes well with logic.

"Two flashes mean, 'Are you there?' Three mean 'yes' and four 'no.'"

Lesson 3: When begging to go to a concert, muster your arguments.

"Prissy Andrews is going to recite 'Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.' That is such a good moral piece, Marilla, I'm sure it would do me lots of good to hear it."

Lesson 4: When that fails, Matthew will always succeed.

"Argument was not his strong point, but holding fast to his opinion certainly was."

Lesson 5: Reminding Marilla how much worse you might be is generally a win.

"But then just think of all the mistakes I don't make, although I might."

Lesson 6: Show your lack of interest in a way that leaves no doubts.

"Only one number on the program failed to interest her. When Gilbert Blythe recited "Bingen on the Rhine" Anne picked up Rhoda Murray's library book and read it until he had finished, when she sat rigidly stiff and motionless while Diana clapped her hands until they tingled."

Lesson 7: Look before you leap.

"The two little white-clad figures flew down the long room, through the spare-room door, and bounded on the bed at the same moment. And then—something—moved beneath them, there was a gasp and a cry—and somebody said in muffled accents: 'Merciful goodness!'"

Lesson 8: Rachel Lynde knows everything. Don't even try to fight it.

"Old Miss Barry is rich and they'd like to keep on the good side of her. Of course, Mrs. Barry didn't say just that to me, but I'm a pretty good judge of human nature, that's what."

Lesson 9: Turn your weaknesses into strengths.

"I've been so used in my early days to having people cross at me that I can endure it much better than Diana can."

Lesson 10: Even crotchety old people can surprise you.

"I'm afraid my imagination is a little rusty—it's so long since I used it"

Chapter 18: Anne saves the day

2011-08-11T07:01:00.000-04:00

Who else grew up on the American Girl books? Each girl's series included a Saves the Day book -- Kirsten Saves the Day, Samantha Saves the Day, and so on. Well, this is Anne's version.

Anne and Matthew are left home while Marilla, Rachel Lynde, and various other Avonlea adults go off to play politics.

"It was a January the Premier came, to address his loyal supporters and such of his nonsupporters as chose to be present at the monster mass meeting held in Charlottetown."

At the time Montgomery was writing, the Premier in question was Sir John MacDonald.

"Mrs. Rachel Lynde was a red-hot politician and couldn't have believed that the political rally could be carried through without her, although she was on the opposite side of politics. So she went to town and took her husband—Thomas would be useful in looking after the horse—and Marilla Cuthbert with her. Marilla had a sneaking interest in politics herself, and as she thought it might be her only chance to see a real live Premier, she promptly took it, leaving Anne and Matthew to keep house until her return the following day."

Anne and Matthew are enjoying a cozy afternoon at Green Gables (which in this case means Anne's doing just about all the talking):

"I learn the proposition off by heart and then he draws it on the blackboard and puts different letters from what are in the book and I get all mixed up."

"Ruby Gillis says when she grows up she's going to have ever so many beaus on the string and have them all crazy about her; but I think that would be too exciting. I'd rather have just one in his right mind."

... when Diana bursts in. Little sister Minnie May has come down with a bad case of croup, and the senior Barrys have also gone to see the Premier. As has the doctor. This gives Anne an opportunity to draw on the experience of taking care of "twins three times" -- she knows what to do, and she does it.

"Anne, although sincerely sorry for Minnie May, was far from being insensible to the romance of the situation and to the sweetness of once more sharing that romance with a kindred spirit."

Also, it provides Montgomery with another opportunity to disdain French Canadians.

"Young Mary Joe, a buxom, broad-faced French girl from the creek, whom Mrs. Barry had engaged to stay with the children during her absence, was helpless and bewildered, quite incapable of thinking what to do, or doing it if she thought of it."

Anne's nursing gets Minnie May turned around by the time the doctor arrives, and she's the hero of the day.

But aside from the drama and romance of it all, the best part, as far as Anne's concerned, is that Mrs. Barry decides this is a decent reason to forgive her for letting Diana intoxicate herself, so the girls are allowed to be friends again.

Chapter 17: Life goes on

2011-08-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, I jumped the gun a bit in Chapter 16. This is where Anne and Diana make their meldramatic farewells.

"Ten minutes isn't very long to say an eternal farewell in"

Anne is devastated, though Marilla reminds her she's still got her wits:

"'I don't think there is much fear of your dying of grief as long as you can talk, Anne,' said Marilla unsympathetically."

Now that she's forcibly lost her best friend, Anne decides she might as well go back to school, where she can at least see Diana, even if they're not allowed to speak. And she's determined to be at the top of her class -- especially since that means she'll get to beat Gilbert Blythe.

"it was entirely good natured on Gilbert's side; but it is much to be feared that the same thing cannot be said of Anne, who had certainly an unpraiseworthy tenacity for holding grudges"

Also, one noteworthy allusion in this chapter:

"The Caesar's pageant shorn of Brutus' bust
Did but of Rome's best son remind her more."

That would be Anne (or at least the narrator) quoting from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" to describe her post-Diana emotions. Thematically appropriate, if perhaps a little implausible for an 11-year-old girl.

Chapter 16: A sad day at Green Gables

2011-08-10T06:47:00.000-04:00

On one level, this chapter is about the rupture that occurs in the bosom friendship when Diana manages to get herself drunk.

At the same time, we get more insight into Marilla, and see how she subtly rebels against community norms.

Anne invites Diana over for tea while Marilla is out, giving them both a chance to play sophisticated grownup. Anne ("There are so many responsibilities on a person's mind when they're keeping house, isn't there?") plans the meal in exquisite detail, Diana ("looking exactly as it is proper to look when asked out to tea") very politely inquires after Marilla and Matthew -- and then they remember that they're little girls who don't have to act like that all the time.

Oh, and we get to hear about some of Anne's cooking disasters! "The last time I made a cake I forgot to put the flour in.... Flour is so essential to cakes, you know."

And then Diana starts to feel off, and decides to go home -- where her mother discovers that she's not sick, she's drunk. Because the three cups of raspberry cordial she had turned out to be currant wine.

Which was a total accident. Not a precursor to the Avonlea equivalent of beer pong. But Mrs. Barry totally doesn't care. Remember how Montgomery gave us a signal that Mrs. Barry was not entirely to be trusted when she was first introduced? There was a reason.

"Mrs. Barry was a woman of strong prejudices and dislikes, and her anger was of the cold, sullen sort which is always hardest to overcome. To do her justice, she really believed Anne had made Diana drunk out of sheer malice prepense, and she was honestly anxious to preserve her little daughter from the contamination of further intimacy with such a child."

"She was suspicious of Anne's big words and dramatic gestures and imagined that the child was making fun of her."

Result: Diana is banned from all contact with Anne. Both girls are devastated. Melodramatically so.
But back to the currant wine for a minute: It turns out that Avonlea residents are of the teetotalling strain of Calvinism, so Marilla's actually been rebelling against her neighbors by making it. (Although she doesn't go so far as to rebel against an official authority figure.)

"Well, this story will be a nice handle for those folks who are so down on me for making currant wine, although I haven't made any for three years ever since I found out that the minister didn't approve."

At least Marilla (in Lydia Pinkham mode) is able to laugh (discreetly) at the situation. Anne doesn't seem to believe she'll ever laugh again.

Chapter 15: A Tempest in the School Teapot

2011-08-09T22:14:00.000-04:00

The post title for this chapter is the same as the actual chapter title, because it made such an impression on my when I first read the book. I hadn't yet come across the phrase "tempest in a teapot," so I didn't understand the play on words, but there was something about the rhythm or the imagery of it that stuck with me.

Anyway.

There are a lot of great lines in this chapter, so let's do a quick summary and then get into those.

Anne puts in her first appearance at Avonlea school -- coincidentally, on the same day that Gilbert Blythe gets back to town. Gilbert decides that the best way to get the attention of a redhead is to call her "Carrots," and is informed otherwise by means of a slate connecting with his skull. The situation is not improved by an incompetent teacher who singles Anne out for punishment -- and even worse, misspells her name -- and the chapter ends with Anne deciding that she's not going back there any time soon.

And the good bits:

"The little girls of Avonlea school always pooled their lunches, and to eat three raspberry tarts all alone or even to share them only with one's best chum would have forever and ever branded as 'awful mean' the girl who did it. And yet, when the tarts were divided among ten girls you just got enough to tantalize you."
"'Not that lovers ever really walk there,' she explained to Marilla, 'but Diana and I are reading a perfectly magnificent book and there's a Lover's Lane in it. So we want to have one, too.'"
"if you were quiet—which, with Anne and Diana, happened about once in a blue moon"
"'I guess Gilbert Blythe will be in school today,' said Diana. 'He's been visiting his cousins over in New Brunswick all summer and he only came home Saturday night. He's AW'FLY handsome, Anne. And he teases the girls something terrible. He just torments our lives out.'... Diana's voice indicated that she rather liked having her life tormented out than not."
"Gilbert Blythe wasn't used to putting himself out to make a girl look at him and meeting with failure."
"And then—thwack! Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert's head and cracked it—slate not head—clear across."
"'Oh how could you, Anne?' breathed Diana as they went down the road half reproachfully, half admiringly. Diana felt that SHE could never have resisted Gilbert's plea."
"Diana hadn't the least idea what Anne meant but she understood it was something terrible."
"Mr. Phillips's brief reforming energy was over; he didn't want the bother of punishing a dozen pupils; but it was necessary to do something to save his word, so he looked about for a scapegoat and found it in Anne"
"Once, when nobody was looking, Gilbert took from his desk a little pink candy heart with a gold motto on it, "You are sweet," and slipped it under the curve of Anne's arm. Whereupon Anne arose, took the pink heart gingerly between the tips of her fingers, dropped it on the floor, ground it to powder beneath her heel, and resumed her position without deigning to bestow a glance on Gilbert."
"Marilla saw something remarkably like unyielding stubbornness looking out of Anne's small face. She understood that she would have trouble in overcoming it; but she re-solved wisely to say nothing more just then."
"'Well, since you've asked my advice, Marilla,' said Mrs. Lynde amiably—Mrs. Lynde dearly loved to be asked for advice"
"'I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband—I just hate him furiously. I've been imagining it all out—the wedding and everything—Diana dressed in snowy garments, with a veil, and looking as beautiful and regal as a queen; and me the bridesmaid, with a lovely dress too, and puffed sleeves, but with a breaking heart hid beneath my smiling face.'"
"Marilla turned quickly away to hide her twitching face; but it was no use; she collapsed on the nearest chair and burst into such a hearty and unusual peal of laughter that Matthew, crossing the yard outside, halted in amazement. When had he heard Marilla laugh like that before?"

What I do

2011-08-08T20:42:00.009-04:00

(When I'm not blogging about old books, of course.)

I know I sound like a pretentious twit when I say this, but I kind of don't get people who aren't news junkies.

This is not new. But I was reminded of it tonight courtesy of a tweet from a friend who had been unaware that riots are currently happening in London and other English cities.

No matter how much I say I'm not judging her for that, you're free to start the name-calling now.

That's why I can't imagine having the experience my parents did two summers in a row:

We went on August road trips, to the Four Corners area in 1990 and ~~Yosemite~~ Lake Tahoe in 1991. Both lovely places, remote in parts, but hardly cut off from the world.

And both times, my parents (and the rest of us, but as I was still in the single digits I can't take too much credit) figured out that something big had happened during those trips when they stopped at a gas station and found the prices much higher than the last time they'd filled up.

Something big, August 1990: Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Something big, August 1991: A Soviet coup briefly deposed Gorbachev.

And somehow, when those events happened, we didn't have a newspaper. We hadn't turned on NPR. (I didn't grow up with TV news, so that one's not surprising. And yes, y'all, this was pre-Internet. I'm old.)

We were on vacation, and it didn't occur to my parents that some kind of news consumption was an essential part of our day. That's a choice I just don't see myself making.

I check news sites first thing in the morning. On a day like today, I had the NYT front page up in a tab all day. And let's not even talk about how often I check Twitter.

This isn't just a generational thing; the Internet is just the most current mode of information transfer. What I do -- what I want to do -- is know what's going on and tell other people about it.

It was, to some extent, what I did when I was at ABA. (That was the external side. The internal side involved a lot of me popping into my boss' office to share the latest industry ~~nonsense~~ developments, and it was a hit.)

If Andy Carvin didn't exist, I'd want his job. (Unfortunately, I was not hired when I said that, more elegantly, when I interviewed at NPR.)

This is what I do. In some form, it's what I will always do, whether or not it's part of my job description.

But if someone wants to pay me to do it, I wouldn't say no.

(Post pics are -- assuming I labeled them correctly -- from the 1991 Yosemite trip. Taken with a magenta flip-flash camera, baby!)

[Update, 8/9: So much for my steel-trap memory. A conversation with my mom tonight led to us determining that the August 1991 trip was, in fact, to Lake Tahoe. We spent a long weekend or something like that at Yosemite in the spring of that year. No breaking news during that vacation; it was mostly memorable for my first-ever coyote sighting. In addition to name-calling, you are also now free to mock.]

Chapter 14: Accused, confessed, and vindicated

2011-08-07T20:05:00.000-04:00

Marilla's brooch (go back to Chapter 13 if you're confused) has gone missing.

Anne saw it. In fact, she picked it up and played with it, even though she wasn't supposed to. Which makes her, in Marilla's eyes, the guilty party.

Which Anne steadfastly denies.

"I never took the brooch out of your room and that is the truth, if I was to be led to the block for it—although I'm not very certain what a block is. So there, Marilla."

Result: Anne is confined to her bedroom until she confesses -- which means, if she doesn't, missing the Sunday School picnic. (Again, Chapter 13.) Which means she's in the depths of despair -- oh, and refusing

"Boiled pork and greens are so unromantic when one is in affliction."

Matthew, incidentally, is the person who listens to this particular plaint, which sticks with him when he goes down to his own dinner:

"mournfully surveying his plateful of unromantic pork and greens as if he, like Anne, thought it a food unsuited to crises of feeling"

Marilla has her doubts, but she's not willing to share them. She reminds Matthew that the whole child-raising thing is her business, thank you very much.

"The retort silenced Matthew if it did not convince him. That dinner was a very dismal meal. The only cheerful thing about it was Jerry Buote, the hired boy, and Marilla resented his cheerfulness as a personal insult."

Result: Since she's not allowed out of her room until she confesses, and she desperately wants to go to the picnic, Anne decides to make up an elaborate confession, the upshot of which is dropping the brooch into the pond during a romantic reverie.

Which, understandably, displeases Marilla. As punishment, Anne's not allowed to go to the picnic after all, prompting moans of unfairness.

Until Marilla discovers that the brooch has, in fact, gotten caught in her shawl, and has been hiding in the closet for the past two days. Much apologizing ensues, Anne goes to the picnic, and all is well again.

Chapter 13: Marilla's first kiss

2011-08-07T19:53:00.000-04:00

This chapter is mostly a setup for Chapter 14. The salient details are this: Anne's excited about the Sunday School picnic, and Marilla has a brooch that's her one nice piece of jewelry.

That said, there's still some good stuff here.

Good idiom: nineteen to the dozen, as in Marilla's "now she's perched out there on the woodpile talking to Matthew, nineteen to the dozen, when she knows perfectly well she ought to be at her work." The Annotated Anne claims that this means "for every dozen words a normal person can speak, Anne can cram in nineteen." That seems a bit too specific for a common phrase, and other etymology sources just say it means doing something fast (and may have come out of the mechanization of coal mining -- your trivia tidbit for the evening).
Good Anne-phrase: "just little young rainbows that haven't grown big yet." Don't you want to pick them up and cuddle them?
Good bonding:"It was the first time in her whole life that childish lips had voluntarily touched Marilla's face. Again that sudden sensation of startling sweetness thrilled her. She was secretly vastly pleased at Anne's impulsive caress, which was probably the reason why she said brusquely..."
Good description: Even if you had no idea what an amethyst looked like, you'd understand what Anne's on about: "They are what I used to think diamonds were like. Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like. I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones. When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried."

So: picnic and brooch. Remember those.

Chapter 12: Bosom friends

2011-08-04T08:27:00.000-04:00

I had such lofty dreams of illustrating this post with images of all the flowers Montgomery lists in Mrs. Barry's garden:

"There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet lightning that shot its fiery lances over prim white musk-flowers"

Which would be lovely. But I also thought it might be nice to get this post published before Christmas.

So. This is the chapter in which we meet one of the other key players in Anne's life. It takes about two minutes for Anne and Diana Barry to become fast friends.

But first we meet Mrs. Barry, and if you know what comes later, you'll see that she's very deliberately being set up as an unsympathetic character here.

"She reads entirely too much—" this to Marilla as the little girls went out—"and I can't prevent her, for her father aids and abets her."

So things are good in Avonlea, on many levels. Which is something Marilla comes very close to admitting herself:

"I will say it for the child," said Marilla when Anne had gone to her gable, "she isn't stingy. I'm glad, for of all faults I detest stinginess in a child. Dear me, it's only three weeks since she came, and it seems as if she'd been here always. I can't imagine the place without her. Now, don't be looking I told-you-so, Matthew. That's bad enough in a woman, but it isn't to be endured in a man. I'm perfectly willing to own up that I'm glad I consented to keep the child and that I'm getting fond of her, but don't you rub it in, Matthew Cuthbert."

Stuff I mostly haven't read yet

2011-07-28T10:10:00.002-04:00

... but am sharing anyway. Partly so I can clear out my bookmarks, and partly because a quick skim makes me reasonably confident that there's something to worth reading in all of these.

Jo Walton on "reading protocols." An older piece that Josh Christie turned up a couple weeks ago. Thought-provoking, but I still haven't formed an articulate response to it.
"When Jill Abramson Was the Only Grownup..." This one I have read. And now I want to be a reporter again.
Andrew Karre on the end goal of contemporary YA romance. Much more interesting than my description makes it sound. Go read it.
Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. Haven't read this one, but Craig Mod's previous stuff has been worth it.
A look at changes in book publishing over the last couple decades. See above, then substitute Peter Osnos for Craig Mod.
Junot Díaz on disasters. Because it's Junot Díaz.
Some day I plan to blog about the sheer awesomeness of Annette Gordon-Reed. For now, this.

Chapter 11: I feel you, Anne -- I want pretty dresses too!

2011-07-22T10:09:00.000-04:00

No, clothes aren't the exclusive focus of this chapter. But just as much as Sunday School (which actually appears in the chapter title), this chapter deals with the difference between how Anne and Marilla deal with appearance.

Marilla has made Anne some new dresses to replace her asylum clothes:

"One was of snuffy colored gingham which Marilla had been tempted to buy from a peddler the preceding summer because it looked so serviceable; one was of black-and-white checkered sateen which she had picked up at a bargain counter in the winter; and one was a stiff print of an ugly blue shade which she had purchased that week at a Carmody store.... She had made them up herself, and they were all made alike—plain skirts fulled tightly to plain waists, with sleeves as plain as waist and skirt and tight as sleeves could be."

Anne, though intent on being grateful, can't help but long for puffed sleeves. Which Marilla thinks are both wasteful and ridiculous.

"But I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself," persisted Anne mournfully.

But just a little further along in the chapter, we get to see that Anne doesn't care all that much about general standards of fashion, as long as her own standards are met -- and a wreath of flowers, picked on the way to church, certainly satisfies the second condition.

"Whatever other people might have thought of the result it satisfied Anne, and she tripped gaily down the road, holding her ruddy head with its decoration of pink and yellow very proudly."

Anne gets through her first experience in the Avonlea church without mishap, though she has plenty to criticize when she gets home to Marilla. And once again Marilla's facing a conflict between the sense that she should be instilling absolute respect for authority in her new charge, and the fact that Anne's critique is pretty on-target.

"Marilla felt helplessly that all this should be sternly reproved, but she was hampered by the undeniable fact that some of the things Anne had said, especially about the minister's sermons and Mr. Bell's prayers, were what she herself had really thought deep down in her heart for years, but had never given expression to. It almost seemed to her that those secret, unuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity."

Chapter 10: What's an imagination for if not to make things up?

2011-07-22T09:35:00.000-04:00

First, another look at the pre-Anne atmosphere at Green Gables:

"As a general thing Matthew gravitated between the kitchen and the little bedroom off the hall where he slept; once in a while he ventured uncomfortably into the parlor or sitting room when the minister came to tea. But he had never been upstairs in his own house since the spring he helped Marilla paper the spare bedroom, and that was four years ago."

Matthew, having promised to stay out of Anne's upbringing, now finds himself interfering for the first time. Because, after all, he does know better.

What's more, he knows how to persuade, so that Anne, who had been steadfastly refusing to apologize to Mrs. Rachel, sees that maybe she's wrong.

"It would be true enough to say I am sorry, because I AM sorry now. I wasn't a bit sorry last night."

And then Anne agrees to tell Marilla nothing of his "interference":

"Wild horses won't drag the secret from me," promised Anne solemnly. "How would wild horses drag a secret from a person anyhow?"

I suppose that's a reference to the quartering portion of drawing and quartering -- but those are generally domesticated horses used for that purpose. So how did "wild horses" become part of the cliche? The idea of being trampled by them? Somehow dragged behind one?

You can see this is Miss Shirley's affect on everyone, not just her adoptive family.

So Anne tells Marilla that she's agreed to apologize, and they head over to the Lynde house. But Marilla's a smart lady, and she notices things:

"But the former under-stood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation—was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure."

Complete with begging forgiveness on her knees.

"Good Mrs. Lynde, not being overburdened with perception, did not see this."

Narrative snark FTW.

And then we get another look at how Marilla is the one changing here, learning what it means to have a child in her life and to unbend occasionally.

"Something warm and pleasant welled up in Marilla's heart at touch of that thin little hand in her own—a throb of the maternity she had missed, perhaps. Its very unaccustomedness and sweetness disturbed her. She hastened to restore her sensations to their normal calm by inculcating a moral."

Chapter 9: The famous temper

2011-07-19T16:43:00.000-04:00

Anne's settling in at Green Gables, but it's a while before she meets her neighbor. (As opposed to the rest of us, who met Rachel Lynde in the first chapter.) But as Montgomery points out:

"Mrs. Rachel, to do her justice, was not to blame for this."

Mrs. Rachel, to do her justice, doesn't waste any time telling Anne what her faults are -- with special emphasis on Anne's appearance. Miss Shirley does not restrain herself.

"I hate you," she cried in a choked voice, stamping her foot on the floor. "I hate you—I hate you—I hate you—" a louder stamp with each assertion of hatred. "How dare you call me skinny and ugly? How dare you say I'm freckled and redheaded? You are a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman!"

Which, while perhaps not entirely true, is certainly justified.

"Oh, but there's such a difference between saying a thing yourself and hearing other people say it," wailed Anne.

Marilla, of course, is rather put out at this scene -- and by the fact that she gets where Anne's coming from, so it's difficult for her to balance ideals of Calvinist upbringing with human feelings.

"An old remembrance suddenly rose up before Marilla. She had been a very small child when she had heard one aunt say of her to another, 'What a pity she is such a dark, homely little thing.' Marilla was every day of fifty before the sting had gone out of that memory."

Ouch.

Anne prepares herself for some horrible punishment, showing off that imagination we've already become acquainted with, and giving Marilla the opportunity to deliver an excellent deadpan:

"We're not in the habit of shutting people up in dark damp dungeons," said Marilla drily, "especially as they're rather scarce in Avonlea."

The upshot is this: Anne is under orders to apologize to Mrs. Rachel. Anne is understandably reluctant to do so. Which sets us up for Chapter 10, but not without a closing line that makes Marilla that much more lovable:

"She was as angry with herself as with Anne, because, whenever she recalled Mrs. Rachel's dumbfounded countenance her lips twitched with amusement and she felt a most reprehensible desire to laugh."

Chapter 8: Our heroine assumes her title

2011-07-08T10:04:00.000-04:00

The first night of Anne's permanent residence at Green Gables has passed, and now she and Marilla set about the business of getting to know one another for real.

"By noon she had concluded that Anne was smart and obedient, willing to work and quick to learn; her most serious shortcoming seemed to be a tendency to fall into daydreams in the middle of a task and forget all about it until such time as she was sharply recalled to earth by a reprimand or a catastrophe."

Remember how I mentioned the "Miss Cuthbert" thing a couple chapters back? Here Marilla explains why she wants Anne to call her by her first name:

"I'm not used to being called Miss Cuthbert and it would make me nervous.... Everybody, young and old, in Avonlea calls me Marilla except the minister. He says Miss Cuthbert—when he thinks of it."

And we get a delightful, possibly snarky insight into Marilla's thought process. She may not have any experience with raising girls, but she certainly has her ideas about how it ought to be done:

"Marilla was as fond of morals as the Duchess in Wonderland, and was firmly convinced that one should be tacked on to every remark made to a child who was being brought up."

And then finally, Anne begins to identify with her new home.

"But it's a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular, isn't it?"

Yes, Anne, it is.

The Men of L'Engle #9: Adam Eddington

2011-07-06T14:47:00.000-04:00

Let's just let Ms. L. introduce Adam, shall we?

"Adam Eddington, sixteen, going on seventeen, out of high school and set for Berkeley in the winter.... He had always, with a degree of arrogance, considered himself sophisticated because he had grown up in New York, because his friendships cut across racial and economic barriers, because he could cope with the subway and shuttle at rush hours, because the island of Manhattan (he thought) held no surprises for him."

This is the Adam we first meet in The Arm of the Starfish, heading off to get himself involved in far more international intrigue than usually accompanies a summer internship.

Which is actually the first of two times he ends up in the midst of completely unrelated international intrigues. By accident. The kid has a talent for it, even if he doesn't seem to have learned much from the first go-round.

But we're willing to overlook that, generally, because he's pretty awesome otherwise. Also he loves Vicky, and who reads the Austin books without identifying at least a little with her?

As far as I'm concerned, though, the single most endearing thing about Adam is one very subtle line in A Ring of Endless Light: "his trunks were zebra-striped." L'Engle just lets it fall, in the midst of Vicky's thoughts about the rest of his appearance (conclusion: not bad), and she expects the reader to know that the only reason zebra-striped swimming trunks matter is because they are the ones Joshua used.

Leading characteristics:

Chauvinist. Despite the fact that he's the awesome love interest (and he speaks Spanish), I'm not going to give him a pass on this one. It's particularly egregious in The Arm of the Starfish, where he lets himself get into all sorts of trouble with Kali because "what she was saying was only a soprano twittering in his ears. Most girls' conversation was, in his opinion."
Scientific. A point he makes over and over. See pull quotes.
Trustworthy. The first adjective Vicky applies to him, and we're never given any reason to doubt it.
Easygoing. Maybe that's not the word I'm looking for -- how would you describe someone who's totally comfortable joining in family singalongs with people he's only just met?

Pull quotes:

"I'm a scientist, not a poet. Even when I was a kid I read Scientific American, not fairy tales."
"You can't hindsight that way. When something happens, it happens, and you have to accept it and go on from there."
"I think that places hold atmospheres, too."

The Men of L'Engle #8: Zachary Gray

2011-07-05T16:55:00.001-04:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that you have to have a much stronger belief than I do in the possibility of Zachary's reform to find him a likable character. Maybe I'm too black-and-white, but I don't see him as a complex character, just a slimy one.

But I do have a lot to say about him. So that's something.¹

I'm almost surprised that L'Engle never made an explicit Holden Caulfield reference in her descriptions of Zachary, because there's a clear resemblance. "Phony" and "crumby" make frequent appearances in Zachary's conversation; he's a rich kid largely ignored by his parents; none of what happens is his fault.

Zachary makes his first appearance in The Moon by Night, just after one of his prep school expulsions. Choate once, Hotchkiss another time -- at least the guy gets thrown out of classy places.² He pursues Vicky as the Austin family travels across the country, then turns up two years later to pursue her again.

After he (not much of a spoiler) makes a complete ass of himself, repeatedly puts Vicky in danger, and abandons her. Then he appears in A House Like a Lotus, where he pursues Polly, makes a complete ass of himself, puts Polly in danger, and abandons her. Anyone want to guess what happens in An Acceptable Time?

And then at the end, he's allegedly hit bottom, seen the error of his ways, and redeemed himself. Which I do not find one bit convincing. Because after abandoning Vicky, he appeared to have seen the error of his ways.

So I don't see Zachary as a flawed but ultimately decent character. He's a bundle of abuser warning signs. Perhaps he'll give someone else a chance to learn the lesson Polly didn't: If a boy thinks that "non-virgin status" = "reason to let him have his way" -- that's when you get up and walk out.

Leading characteristics:

Spoiled. And knows it. He's well aware of his ability to get anything he wants out of his parents. Or as he puts it: "When I don't get what I want I have hysterics. They're very effective."
Gorgeous. This is one point Vicky and Polly are both very clear on. The "Hamlet look," as Vicky calls it, works for him.
Manipulative. And utterly sleazy. (Sorry. Personal sentiment intruding there.) But just look at how he plays with Vicky and Polly's emotions. There is just no reason for a line like "If I had somebody like you around maybe I wouldn't go getting kicked out of schools all the time."

Pull quote(s):

"money and connections can do wonders"
"I've been in a filthy mood. Get me out of my mood."
"I'm a self-protective bastard."
"Polly, don't you understand? I needed you. I needed you terribly."
"I don't want to be a lawyer, as you so naively put it, but I intend to be one."

Where's Zachary now? Somewhere expensive, probably. Not a lawyer. And still not worth it.

¹ Also, he's the excuse for Suzy to taunt Vicky with "Love is a little thing shaped like a lizard; it runs up and down and tickles your gizzard." Which is just lovely.²
² Basically, he flunks out by choice. Or as Polly puts it, "He didn't do well in school because if he's not interested, he doesn't bother."
³ I mean that in a totally non-sarcastic way. (I know; it's not always easy to tell.)

The Men of L'Engle #7: Alex Murry

2011-07-04T20:07:00.000-04:00

We don't find out Alex Murry's name when he first appears -- to Meg, he's just "Father." The first name becomes necessary by the time An Acceptable Time rolls around, though, since we're now talking multiple generations.

Alex is a brilliant scientist who manages to get himself trapped on Camazotz the first time he tessers. (Yeah, spoiler. On the off-chance you need a refresher, watch.) Before and after that, he's off doing high-powered research at various government facilities -- and, when he's so inclined, in the lab he and his wife share in their Connecticut farmhouse.

Leading characteristics:

Absent-minded professor. When Meg is first explaining Alex to Calvin, she explains why his hair is long in the picture they're looking at: "he keeps forgetting to have it cut. Mother usually ends up doing it for him -- she bought clippers and stuff -- because he won't take the time to go to the barber"
Family man. Even though he's off-screen for most of A Wrinkle in Time, having allegedly abandoned his family (though of course we know better), all evidence still points to his loyalty to hearth and home. We hear how he taught Meg to do math with "far too many shortcuts." And then we see him step in to take care of Polly (oh, look, another tesser).

Pull quotes:

"So Murray Gell-Mann, who named [quarks], obviously read Joyce. I find that rather comforting."
"Tessering is even more complicated than we had suspected."
"Mr. President, hello!"

What's Alex up to these days? I can't imagine him actually retired, can you? I think he's still hanging out in the farmhouse, working on experiments and absolutely trying not to open another tesser if he can &#$*% help it.

The Men of L'Engle #6: Calvin O'Keefe

2011-07-03T16:56:00.002-04:00

Ah, Calvin. No doubt part of your popularity is the number of Meg-like girls who wanted to imagine they could end up happily married to the first boy they ever talked to.

We first meet Calvin when he's a gawky 14-year-old, two years ahead in school and far more than two inches too tall for his clothes. He's an outsider in his own (huge) family, but the minute he walks into the Murry house, he knows he's found a home.

And while I'd normally be all up in arms about controlling tendencies at a passage like this:

"Well, you know what, you've got dreamboat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have."

-- the fact that it's Calvin (okay, and the fact that I totally understand how Meg felt, having done the glasses-and-braces thing myself) makes it acceptable.

Leading characteristics:

Family man. He cares about his family when they don't care about him, and once he and Meg marry, they end up with a family big enough for a baseball team. And when we see him from Polly's perspective, in A House Like a Lotus and An Acceptable Time, he appears to be a pretty awesome father.
Brilliant. To put it mildly. A Wrinkle in Time suggests that there's some sort of biological difference, although this never comes up again. But we do get to see him as a researcher widely acknowledged as top in his field, getting special government assent to his work. And this despite the fact that his future wife had to help him with his math homework.
Fond of islands. As an adult, Calvin chooses to make his home on various marginally populated coastal islands where he can work out of a home laboratory. (Don't you wish you had one?)
Rather normal. I mean, despite the fact that he's been inside his brother-in-law's mitochondria, not to mention several other planets.

Pull quotes:

"There hasn't been anybody, anybody in the world I could talk to. Sure, I can function on the same level as everybody else, I can hold myself down, but it isn't me."
"We came to the island... because it was, at the time, one of the few places left in the world where I could bring up my family and work undisturbed."
"I've stumbled onto something. Something that is unusual, desirable to many people, and important."

And where's Calvin now? Based on my acquaintance with Georgia's coastal islands, I'm pretty sure Benne Seed has gotten far too built up for the Murry-O'Keefe comfort level. And the senior Murrys are getting on in years, so I wouldn't be surprised to find Meg and Calvin heading back to New England. But beyond that? He's researching, as ever.

Chapter 7: Religious instruction

2011-07-03T13:30:00.000-04:00

In this chapter:

"Marilla decided that Anne's religious training must be begun at once. Plainly there was no time to be lost."

Which turns out to be an interesting experience for these traditionalist, Calvinist, upright Scotch Presbyterians. Anne's memorized the catechism, but no one's ever answered her religious questions. And, since she's Anne, you know there are questions.

Also, no one's ever taught her about praying, which is Marilla's immediate concern.

"Poor Marilla was only preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was responsible for this extraordinary petition."

Marilla doesn't say anything, but Anne realizes, once she's wrapped up, that there was something not quite right about her extemporaneous prayer.

"I should have said, 'Amen' in place of 'yours respectfully,' shouldn't I?—the way the ministers do. I'd forgotten it, but I felt a prayer should be finished off in some way, so I put in the other. Do you suppose it will make any difference?"

And in this very short chapter -- both in word count and temporally; it really is just Anne saying her prayers before bed -- we get another glimpse at Marilla's character, phrased in a particularly lovely way.

"But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor—which is simply another name for a sense of fitness of things"

The Men of L'Engle #5: Josiah Davidson

2011-07-02T15:54:00.001-04:00

Better known, of course, as Dave. He shows up in The Young Unicorns, L'Engle's departure from the usual structure of her Austin family books. (Which is directly related to the fact that I'm not a big fan of it, and therefore don't have much to say about Dave.)

Dave, now that he's no longer in a gang, spends his days in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and also becomes a part of the Austins' extended New York family, because he has the responsibility of reading homework assignments aloud to their blind neighbor. (Okay, my dislike of The Young Unicorns also has something to do with its sheer preposterousness. Moving on.)

He also turns up in A Severed Wasp, one of L'Engle's adult novels, married to Suzy Austin.

Leading characteristics:

Taciturn. Dave always makes me think of Dan Mangan from the Trixie Belden books. He's got the same slightly hostile, trust-no-one thing going on.
Decent. At the same time, he's made the choice to step away from gang life, and he's got a real sense of responsibility toward Emily -- and, after a fashion, toward everyone else.

Pull quote(s):

"I'm an ex-hood."

Where is he now? Dave's always been associated with St. John the Divine, so he's one of those people who become as much a part of the building as the stones that make it.

The Men of L'Engle #4: Sandy and Dennys

2011-07-01T15:50:00.000-04:00

Sandy and Dennys Murry (side note: am I the only one who grew up wanting to pronounce that like Denny's?) are twins, and that's one of their defining traits. They didn't grow up dressing alike or making up their own language or anything like that, but they've got a bond. And besides that, they're the normal ones in the family. No outcast status, no special powers, no Nobel Prizes -- well, there was the one time they ended up helping Noah build the ark, but that was an accident. Most of the time the twins are secondary characters, but in Many Waters they get the stage to themselves.

Leading characteristics:

Sensible. Sandy and Dennys are the more-or-less normal members of the Murry family. They put a premium on conforming, and it's what makes them happy.
Green-thumbed. Someone should count the mentions of the twins' vegetable garden in the L'Engle oeuvre.
Socially conscious: Particularly in A House Like a Lotus. They may not be tessering in their adult lives, but they're still totally going to change the world. In a good way.

Pull quote(s):

Sandy: "If Dad were a plumber or an electrician, and if Mother were somebody's secretary, it would be a lot easier for us."
Dennys: "We've never had willing suspensions of disbelief. We're the pragmatists of the family."
Sandy: "We were stupid, mucking around with an experiment-in-progress."

We get to see the twins grow up in L'Engle's books, so we know that Sandy becomes a lawyer and Dennys is a doctor. And where are they now? I could imagine either one as an Obama appointee, or affiliated with a university. No doubt they're on their Android phones at all hours, since we know that saving the world is not a 9-to-5 job.

Chapter 6: Turning point!

2011-07-01T15:09:00.000-04:00

In the last chapter, Anne talked about her parents' small yellow house. Now we've arrived at Mrs. Spencer's big yellow house. Wanna bet we're being set up for a deliberate contrast?

That's not the only contrast here. You may notice that Mrs. Spencer calls Marilla "Miss Cuthbert." And yet in Chapter 7, Marilla's going to say that everyone except the minister calls her by her first name. We're not in Avonlea anymore.

They've gone to Mrs. Spencer's so Marilla can deposit Anne and let the people who can't seem to give each other messages correctly sort it out. Except that Mrs. Spencer's solution is to send Anne off with Mrs. Peter Blewett, which Marilla knows would be a Very Bad Idea.

She knew Mrs. Peter Blewett only by sight as a small, shrewish-faced woman without an ounce of superfluous flesh on her bones. But she had heard of her. "A terrible worker and driver," Mrs. Peter was said to be; and discharged servant girls told fearsome tales of her temper and stinginess, and her family of pert, quarrelsome children. Marilla felt a qualm of conscience at the thought of handing Anne over to her tender mercies.

(That last line, by the way? A reference to Proverbs. Thank you, Annotated Anne.)

So in the end, it's the prospect of another "good woman" being responsible for Anne that drives Marilla to claim her. You can't accuse her of taking up the responsibility with false ideals:
"I've never brought up a child, especially a girl, and I dare say I'll make a terrible mess of it. But I'll do my best."
Matthew, unsurprisingly, is delighted. Marilla has just one rule for him:

"Perhaps an old maid doesn't know much about bringing up a child, but I guess she knows more than an old bachelor. So you just leave me to manage her."

He has one too:

"Only be as good and kind to her as you can without spoiling her. I kind of think she's one of the sort you can do anything with if you only get her to love you."

(Post pic: A house, though it's not yellow. Look closely -- or click for the full-size version -- and you'll see that the front yard features a birdhouse that is a miniature version of the house itself. This is what happens when builders have time on their hands.)

One of those things that's more true than we'd like to admit

2011-06-20T19:01:00.003-04:00

"A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is the man."

-- The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

A totally sentimental, non-bookish post

2011-06-20T13:15:00.003-04:00

Cassie Rettger, 4/1/1997-6/20/2011

Knew this was coming. But still...

Chapter 5: In which sympathy buttons are pushed

2011-06-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

Anne Shirley is a Deserving Orphan.

"It's likely her parents were nice folks," says Marilla.

No bad inherited traits here, no drunkenness or illegitimacy. Because we wouldn't want to think it was okay to turn out well when there's such a blot on one's history.

Yes, Anne has to fight against circumstances, and the upbringing she lays out here isn't the kind that usually turns abandoned children into productive members of society -- Anne gets very little education, and by the time she's eight years old she's left in charge of younger kids -- but she's got a leg up, because the redeemed orphan genre wouldn't have it any other way.

Anne's parents were married professionals (or, to be more precise, one professional and one professional-turned-SAHM):

"Well, my mother was a teacher in the High school, too, but when she married father she gave up teaching, of course. A husband was enough responsibility."

After her respectable parents die of a respectable cause, Anne gets taken in as an unpaid servant by neighbors. First there's Mrs. Thomas, burdened with a drunken husband, and Mrs. Hammond, who had "twins three times."

"Were those women—Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Hammond—good to you?" asked Marilla, looking at Anne out of the corner of her eye.

"Oh, they MEANT to be—I know they meant to be just as good and kind as possible. And when people mean to be good to you, you don't mind very much when they're not quite—always."

The reader doesn't have to stretch her powers of inference too far to figure out what that means, and Montgomery points out that neither does Marilla:

"for Marilla was shrewd enough to read between the lines of Anne's history and divine the truth"

Hmmm. One gets the sense that Marilla is finding her conscience harder to ignore.

However, Mrs. Spencer's house looms ahead of us at the close of the chapter.

(Post pic: Lake Waban, on the Wellesley campus. But Anne might imagine that it's the Lake of Shining Waters, no?)

Chapter 4: In which Matthew takes (some) action

2011-06-18T19:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, the title character's got plenty of screen time in this chapter, but let's be honest: this is Marilla and Matthew time.

It's the morning after Anne's arrival, and there's still no real intention of keeping her. Not on Marilla's part, at least, thought Matthew, without ever trying to actually assert authority in the household, is pushing for permanence.

In case you haven't picked up on it so far, Marilla. is. a. spinster:

"Marilla really did not know how to talk to the child, and her uncomfortable ignorance made her crisp and curt when she did not mean to be."

And she's used to having things done her way. So when Anne comes chattering down to breakfast, the famous "hold your tongue"¹ makes an appearance.

"Thereupon Anne held her tongue so obediently and thoroughly that her continued silence made Marilla rather nervous, as if in the presence of something not exactly natural. Matthew also held his tongue,—but this was natural,—so that the meal was a very silent one."

In other words, silent meals are the normal course of things at Green Gables. Is this a house in need of a child or what?

Marilla's still very much in the "or what" camp.

"Yet Matthew wished to keep her, of all unaccountable things! Marilla felt that he wanted it just as much this morning as he had the night before, and that he would go on wanting it. That was Matthew's way—take a whim into his head and cling to it with the most amazing silent persistency—a persistency ten times more potent and effectual in its very silence than if he had talked it out."

And from a little further on in the chapter, Marilla's internal monologue:

"I wish he was like other men and would talk things out. A body could answer back then and argue him into reason. But what's to be done with a man who just LOOKS?"

Don't you wonder what they were like growing up together? Just how often did Matthew's silent treatment do the trick?

Anne's trying hard not to set down roots ("If I can't stay here there is no use in my loving Green Gables."), but it's difficult, especially when there's a farm to explore and flowers to be named.

Matthew hitches up the horse and buggy, at Marilla's request, so she can make the trip over to see Mrs. Spencer and sort everything out, but he doesn't let her go without making one last statement in his favor:

"Little Jerry Buote from the Creek was here this morning, and I told him I guessed I'd hire him for the summer."

The boy-who-turned-out-to-be-Anne was intended as a sort of unpaid laborer. So Matthew, we see, is not just shy, taciturn, and persistent. He also qualifies, from time to time, for the "man of action" label.

¹ Although "hold your tongue" and its variants ("held her tongue," etc.) seem to be the signature phrase of Anne of Green Gables -- if nothing else, it's certainly Marilla's top pull quote -- they only appear eight times in the text. Yes, I counted.

Proto-Georgia Nicholson

2011-06-16T18:41:00.005-04:00

Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicholson series: often hilarious, charmingly British, and all-around awesome.¹

And, it turns out, preempted by almost a century.

Which is not to imply in any way that Georgia was in any way copied from her American predecessor. This is just one of those awesome things you can find poking around Project Gutenberg.

Bab: A Sub-Deb is one of the several zillion² Mary Roberts Rinehart books available from PG, and by the time I was halfway through, I realized that Bab was so totally what Georgia would have been if she'd been a not-quite-flapper in 1917 New York.

And it features its own version of Dave the Laugh.

Go, download a copy, and tell me I'm not the only one who sees the parallels.

¹In small doses. There is a limit to how much Georgia one can read before reaching for the nearest David McCullough.

² By which I mean somewhere between 20 and 30. Did you think I was actually going to count them?

Anne elsewhere

2011-06-15T10:32:00.001-04:00

Yesterday's featured title at Anita Silvey's Children's Book-a-Day Almanac? You guessed it.

Chapter 3: Meet Cordelia

2011-06-13T10:33:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the Train earworm.

Anne has now arrived at Green Gables for the first time -- much to the surprise of Marilla, who was still under the impression that Matthew was bringing home a boy.

But that doesn't stop her from being amused -- slightly, involuntarily, unaccustomedly -- when Anne describes the situation as TRAGICAL:

"Something like a reluctant smile, rather rusty from long disuse, mellowed Marilla's grim expression."

It's resolved that, at least for the moment, Anne will stay. After all, Marilla's not heartless, and she knows she's at least temporarily responsible for a little girl, and she can't send her off like a tramp. Sleeping arrangements will be an issue, but we'll get to those shortly.

First, the name question.

What 11-year-old hasn't tried changing his or her name, especially at a moment of epochal change? Like Anne, I went for the slightly exotic and romantic-sounding, but my requests to be addressed as Zarah or Kloe (long before the Kardashians arrived on the scene, I might add) met with about as much success as Anne's "Will you please call me Cordelia?"

Frustrated on that score, our girl takes a tack that this Sarah-with-an-H totally understands. She is Anne-with-an-E:

"Oh, it makes SUCH a difference. It LOOKS so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out?"

Dude, it's true.

Once the introductions reach a satisfactory conclusion, it's time to find somewhere for Anne to spend the night. Girls require a bit more attention than the expected boy, but Marilla's only willing to go so far:

"But the spare room was out of the question for such a stray waif"

The Annotated Anne points out that the spare room was a pretty big deal, something we'll explore more fully in a future chapter. So instead, Anne ends up in the east gable ~~cell~~ room.

"The whitewashed walls were so painfully bare and staring that she thought they must ache over their own bareness. The floor was bare, too, except for a round braided mat in the middle such as Anne had never seen before. In one corner was the bed, a high, old-fashioned one, with four dark, low-turned posts. In the other corner was the aforesaid three-corner table adorned with a fat, red velvet pin-cushion hard enough to turn the point of the most adventurous pin."

Sounds homey, no?

Before the chapter ends, we're treated to one more glimpse into Marilla's mind, before she and Matthew start arguing (thought neither of them would think of it as such) about what to do with Anne:

"Matthew was smoking—a sure sign of perturbation of mind. He seldom smoked, for Marilla set her face against it as a filthy habit; but at certain times and seasons he felt driven to it and them Marilla winked at the practice, realizing that a mere man must have some vent for his emotions."

Matthew's upholding Avonlea's ideals of masculinity here, showing (presumably) strong emotions in a socially-approved way. Women, of course, are assumed to be more temperamental and demonstrative, but it's hard to imagine Chapter-Three-Marilla indulging in any of that.

Convergence

2011-06-02T10:48:00.004-04:00

Track one: Because there's just about no cell signal on the ground floor of the Javits Center, I ended up using my phone to take notes on the 2009 Day of Education keynote at BEA. (Instead of tweeting it, I mean -- that had been my intention.) A couple weeks ago, I discovered that the notes are still on my phone.

Track two: Jill Abramson was just named executive editor of the New York Times, becoming the first woman to hold that position.

Convergence: "jm was 29 when he became newsweek me - feelings of inadequacy..." Translating my notes into actual English, that refers to Jon Meacham's age when he became Newsweek's managing editor. Feelings of inadequacy speak for themselves.

(Post pic: That panel was better known for Sherman Alexie's highly quotable moments, particularly on the subject of e-readers. Not the best picture of me, but um, Sherman Alexie! In pinstripes!)

Because tonight's drive included Sylvia Poggioli's piece on Ratko Mladic...

2011-05-31T22:31:00.004-04:00

(this one)... it seems an appropriate occasion for this piece I wrote a few years back.

Sylvia Poggioli doesn’t know it, but she helped me learn to drive.

Her voice, covering the war and peacekeeping in Kosovo, defined the spring of 1999. I was sixteen, a newly permitted driver, and NPR was the soundtrack to my driving lessons.

Although I took the more-or-less-required commercial driver’s ed class, my mother was my primary driving teacher. (My dad had given me a few lessons, but it didn’t take long for us all to decide that Mom’s temperament was better suited to the learning curve. Dad ended up with the college visits.) Initially, she decided that the radio wasn’t going to be on at all when I was behind the wheel. As I got the basics under control, NPR nudged its way into the speakers.

The UN peacekeeping mission was just getting underway as I got comfortable behind the wheel, and Sylvia was on almost every day.

Maybe that was what turned on my news junkie switch. Growing up I’d always paid attention to current events – friends like to remind me that when I was three or four years old, I explained to them that I read Newsweek “to get informed” – but not as much I did during the second half of high school. I tried not to admit that I usually listened to Morning Edition when I started driving to school – but I knew that the drive usually took 11 minutes, which generally meant that I was listening to the first story after the newscast when I pulled into the parking lot.

In my senior year, I had a free period every morning. Most days I spent the time in the library, keeping up with a news repertoire that included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yes, I was a nerd.

Sylvia Poggioli’s reports from Kosovo didn’t spark my interest in journalism, but they helped to shape it. Part of me wanted to be there with her, breaking the stories of the war and telling the world about a people’s fight to survive. (A more sensible part of me knew that I wouldn’t last long under foreign correspondent conditions, which is why I’m not writing this from Colombia.)

(Post pic: self-portrait at the wheel, many years after I learned to drive. And taken while the car was not in motion, obviously.)

Chapter 2: In which two kindred spirits are introduced

2011-05-17T10:28:00.000-04:00

Chapter Two starts off by introducing us to a new character: Matthew Cuthbert, who spent Chapter One offscreen, is now the POV character.

Montgomery handles Matthew well -- he's amusing, but you're never really laughing at him, even when his asocial nature is on display:

"Matthew enjoyed the drive after his own fashion, except during the moments when he met women and had to nod to them."

Not just here, but throughout the book, Matthew is never an object of ridicule. He's far from perfect, and his personality quirks are presented as the minor faults they are, but Montgomery never openly mocks him.

And then after Matthew completes his peaceful drive to Bright River, the heroine herself finally makes an appearance, sitting outside the station, patiently waiting to be collected. Montgomery introduces her through two theoretical observers, one ordinary and one highly perceptive. From the first, we are led to understand that Anne is something special.¹

For the moment, Anne has no idea she was supposed to have been a boy, and even if Matthew had been inclined to make some sort of explanation, girl's got a mouth.

Also, an imagination:

"I used to lie awake at nights and imagine things like that, because I didn't have time in the day."

And a vocabulary:

"But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?"

And she uses them both on the drive back to Green Gables.

"Matthew, much to his own surprise, was enjoying himself. Like most quiet folks he liked talkative people when they were willing to do the talking themselves and did not expect him to keep up his end of it. But he had never expected to enjoy the society of a little girl. Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse. He detested the way they had of sidling past him timidly, with sidewise glances, as if they expected him to gobble them up at a mouthful if they ventured to say a word."

By the time we reach the end of the chapter, the reader's in agreement with Matthew: let someone else do the disappointing.

"He felt glad that it would be Marilla and not he who would have to tell this waif of the world that the home she longed for was not to be hers after all."

Allusions in this chapter:²

"The little birds sang..." from James Russell Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal"
"so little scope for imagination in an asylum" from Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey
"bearding a lion in its den" from Sir Walter Scott's Marmion
"alabaster brow" from William Shakespeare's Othello

¹ Which is a pretty standard trope for heroic orphan tales. Orphans en masse, as Sallie calls them in Dear Enemy, are objects of pity and reforming efforts. To be worthy of main character status, the orphan generally requires respectably married parents (as opposed to *gasp* illegitimacy) and special interior attributes that make him or her stand out from the community of orphans as a whole.

² By no means complete. I thought I'd done a decent job picking up literary references until I saw what The Annotated Anne of Green Gables took note of.

Chapter 1: In which we establish a mindset

2011-05-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

Today we begin a new chapter-by-chapter series of posts.¹ The goods? Anne of Green Gables.

Anne-the-book was the source of some enduring childhood experiences, and Anne-the-Wonderworks-production even more so.

One day in kindergarten we were asked to bring in our favorite books and read from them. And as my favorite book of the moment was Anne, I certainly didn't think there was anything unusual about my choice. But after I read a couple pages, my teacher asked me to go to the principal's office, where I got to read again. The principal gave me a red pencil for my troubles.²
Just so we're clear: Megan Follows is Anne. Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth are Marilla and Matthew. And so on. I was in the single digits when Wonderworks was in its heyday, and thanks to PBS pledge-drive season, I ended up with taped versions of both Anne and Anne the Sequel, which I have now watched somewhere on the order of eleventy-dozen times since the 1980s.³

So. We open with a portrait of small-town life at its most panopticon-like. (But without the title character, as she doesn't make an appearance until the second chapter.)

Mrs. Rachel Lynde sees her neighbor Matthew Cuthbert drive by, and she starts to speculate. Because that's what Mrs. Rachel does -- pay attention to the details of her neighbors' lives, and retain enough information to make generally accurate guesses about anything she's not immediately privy to.

The residents of small-town PEI are all pretty aware that they live in the public eye:

"Mrs. Rachel knew that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William J. Blair's store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon."

See, when Mrs. Rachel just can't resist, and heads over to Green Gables, home of the siblings Cuthbert, to find out what's going on, Marilla is ready for her:

"She had expected Mrs. Rachel up; she had known that the sight of Matthew jaunting off so unaccountably would be too much for her neighbor's curiosity."

Marilla Cuthbert is the other key character we meet in this chapter. (Matthew gets a few mentions, but Chapter 2 is his turn to shine.)

"She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humor."

Many, many thanks to Gail Gauthier, whose 2008 post ⁴ pointed me to Margaret Atwood's suggestion that Anne can be read as Marilla's story just as much as Anne's:

There's another way of reading Anne of Green Gables, and that's to assume that the true central character is not Anne, but Marilla Cuthbert. Anne herself doesn't really change throughout the book.... Only Marilla unfolds into something unimaginable to us at the beginning of the book. Her growing love for Anne, and her growing ability to express that love - not Anne's duckling-to-swan act - is the real magic transformation. Anne is the catalyst who allows the crisp, rigid Marilla to finally express her long-buried softer human emotions.

Keep that perspective in mind as we read.

For now, "crisp, rigid Marilla" explains to Rachel that Matthew has gone off to pick up an orphan boy they've placed an order for, because you just can't get good help from those ungrateful French these days.⁵ Oh, and it's a good Canadian boy, because she wants nothing to do with "street Arabs" sent over from London by the Barnardo homes.

Ever the helpful neighbor, Rachel responds by listing all of the many things that could go wrong. But neither of them consider the one that will confront us in the next chapter.

¹ Care to follow along with the Anne of Green Gables posts? Lucy Maud Montgomery's work is in the public domain the the US, so the first book in the series (and several others, but not quite all of them -- so no, you won't be the only one wondering what happened to Anne of Windy Poplars) is available from Project Gutenberg.

² And apparently had a conversation with my parents about getting me into the district's gifted-and-talented program. I didn't find out about that until much later, but I did get the sense that he was pretty impressed.

³ On VHS, until just recently. (Thanks, MB!)

⁴ As in yes, I've been thinking about this, without actually blogging about it, for the better part of three years.

⁵ This xenophobia (or whatever the proper term for English-Canadian antipathy to French-Canadians is) will unfortunately make many recurring appearances.

Melancholy heroes, Byronic and otherwise

2011-05-10T15:30:00.000-04:00

What does a 21st-century girl do when she's got (not so) deep philosophical questions? She turns to Twitter!

Don't laugh, 'cause I got answers.

Not everyone agreed with my premise:
When it comes to Heathcliff, I'm with Lit_Gal. But you have to admit that, at least on the level of generalities, there's something to this whole melancholy/brooding thing. Otherwise, Beauty & the Beast¹ would just be a tale of cross-species vindictiveness.

Which is, I think, what both Todd and Laurel are getting at. The Beast isn't antisocial, he's "deep & emotional"!
Anindita's response brought in the other cultural signifier that we usually associate with this kind of character: the Byronic hero.

Here, I have to admit to some gaps in my reading. Byron and his fellow Romantics just don't interest me much, so I have next to no firsthand knowledge of their work. But as a concept -- yeah, Byron & Co. have a lot to answer for.

(Like Heathcliff and Rochester. Having just spent a year-plus with Jane Eyre I'm not going to spend even more pixels on it here. And I've only read Wuthering Heights once (listened to it, actually -- it makes a great audiobook, with all those Yorkshire accents), so I just don't have the knowledge base to get into it.)

Anyway.

When I pushed back on Vladimir's initial response, he offered this, which I love (because I never would have come up with it myself)^2:

A couple other things that did occur to me, based on some favorites:

The Bean Trees: Esteban is already off-limits. The fact that his very appealing melancholy is the result of a pretty horrific past just adds to that -- while making him attractive at the same time.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand: In his review (which was what finally prompted me to actually read my ARC), Ron Charles wrote something⁴ along the lines of "the underlying sadness of the protagonists is what keeps this from being cloying and twee." Not that there's anything wrong with happy stories -- I've gone on the record many times with my sheer dislike of depressing books -- but there's something to be said for depth, too.
Dear Enemy: Sandy's standoffishness/moodiness/Scotchness/occasional moments of sunshine are what make him an effective foil for Sallie. There would be no relationship worth reading about if he were as frivolous/upbeat/playful/etc as she was.
Fire: A great line from the end of the book: "Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don't you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening." So is the enduring appeal of the Beast character the way that it lets us (collectively, in the abstract) deal with our own versions of brooding and melancholy?

What initially inspired all this musing wasn't a book. (Well, wasn't directly a book. I was enjoying the lovely Stewart Finlay-McLennan, but Neil MacNeill was rather the Beast in the original Christy.)

(Quick primer, for everyone who wasn't hooked on period dramas in the 90s.)

Still not sure I've answered my initial question. I've got some half-formed thoughts bopping around, but none that quite make sense. So I'm still working on the topic.

Anyone else?

¹ For purposes of discussion, I'm using Beauty & the Beast -- not a particular version, just the story concept -- as the prototype for this kind of relationship in books and movies and such. Because if I kept typing "melancholy/brooding/etc." at every reference, you'd be just as tired of it as I would.
² Of course, this is totally unrelated to my collosal Twitter-crush³ on @3rdplacepress. No connection whatsoever.
³ Which is not allowed to turn into a full-fledged twelve-year-old-girl-type crush because he's on the opposite side of the country from me.
⁴ I'd be happy to tell you precisely what he wrote, but the Washington Post wants me to pay for articles more than 60 days old, and this one ran in March 2010. I'm not whining about newspaper paywalls -- if Buick⁵ hadn't offered me free reading through the end of the year, I'd be paying my $20 to the Times each month -- but archive paywalls are just dumb.
⁵ No, I don't get it either. But I'll take it.

Tab-closing

2011-05-09T21:00:00.003-04:00

As some of these are tabs I haven't had open for months, I suppose "bookmark-deleting" would be a more accurate title. However: links, not necessarily new, that are worth following:

The Horn Book on Augusta Baker
Discovery of a smugglers' tunnel in Hastings
Monkey See on cultural omnivores
Isaac Asimov is awesome (and, apparently, lived not far from here!)
Caleb Crain on That Photo
Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on books
Jane Eyre thoughts from Laura Miller
Jane Eyre thoughts from What's Old Is New
Why Robert Darnton was one of the historians I actually enjoyed last semester
HNN on park ranger hats
Awaiting: Beekeeping for Beginners (and The Pirate King)
An old headline, but still infuriating
This might actually make Foursquare useful
Because I totally need to spend more time with digital history
Speaking of which: "affective history"
New tagline: "granola is not nongrapefruit"

In which Sarah tries something new

2011-05-09T14:44:00.016-04:00

If you've spent any amount of time with me in person (or, for that matter, on Twitter), you may have noted that "I saw this in Cook's Illustrated" is something of a refrain for me.

Which is my way of saying I don't think I'd be subjecting my cooking skills to public scrutiny for anything less cool than this contest, from CI parent America's Test Kitchen. Visit the test kitchen? Yes, please.

The challenge: Make the Cook's Illustrated Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, and blog about it.

The bonus: This gave me an excuse to break out my brand new matryoskha doll measuring cups.¹

The recipe starts off nice and easy -- mix the dry ingredients.²

Then we get to the first interesting bit: for flavor, CI says to brown the butter.³ This was a new one for me.

As with all new adventures, there was some guesswork. What about all the foam? (It ended up mixing in.) What exactly counts as brown? (About 30 seconds longer than I gave it. I left the pan on the burner while I grabbed a bowl, and when I turned around it was for-real brown.)

For future reference, I'll be judging by smell -- CI calls it "nutty," but it's a little closer to "overly sweet toffee."

See? Brown.

That stick of butter, by the way, is a recent fabulous-for-single-people discovery. Land O'Lakes calls them half-sticks. There will be far less hacking through frozen butter with these around.

What do you add to the butter?⁴ Sugar, of course -- both brown and white for this recipe.

Except. It's reasonable, isn't it, to assume that a never-opened package of brown sugar will be fresh when you open it? Even if it was purchased six (or more) months ago?

Yeah. So much for trying to stock my cabinets in advance.

Also, note to self: acquire a terra cotta bear.⁵

Further note: There are conversions for these things. Instead of chipping away at the block of brown sugar, I could have tried a white-sugar-and-molasses combo.

So after the sugar battle, it was time for the egg-and-a-half. The recipe called for one egg and one yolk. The easiest way to separate the yolk, I assumed, would be to use (for the first time) the egg separator that came with my non-matryoshka set of measuring cups.

You know where this is going, don't you?

Maybe it would have been easier if I had been just a little gentler in opening the egg. Because once you've broken the yolk, there's not much the separator can do to keep it from spilling out.

Perhaps that's what the pointy thing on the end is for. This bears further investigation.

Moving on. The wet ingredients finally ended up in the same bowl, and I dutifully followed the recipe, which ordered me to put them through a mix-and-rest cycle. Then they joined the flour.

In the same bowl, I mean.

And then the chocolate chips appeared, and suddenly they were cookies. Really big cookies (following orders again).⁶

They disappeared into the oven, and emerged (17 minutes later, rather than the recipe's 10-14):

Yum.

Just one problem: There are, as of this writing, twelve and a half of these massive cookies remaining. And -- as per the "single people" reference above -- I live alone. Unless some friends drop by, I'm going to consume all of these myself.

By the end of the week.⁷

Next time: Make these. Eat one. Take the rest to book club. Bask in reflected glory.

¹ Yes, for real. That head, for instance, is the one-cup measure.

² Which I actually did this time. Usually my method is to dump everything into the same bowl and mix. And I don't care what anyone says; it works.

³ Of course, they say to brown it in a stainless pan so you can see the color change, but as the only stainless pot I have is a saucepan currently reposing in the dishwasher, that was a no. Not complaining, though -- it was one less thing I had to buy when I set up this kitchen!

⁴ When you're mixing ingredients properly, which we've already established is rare for me.

⁵ Which still wouldn't have helped when the sugar was in a plastic bag that hadn't been $^$&% opened.

⁶ More or less -- I ended up with 14 cookies instead of the recommended 16, so my idea of a 3-tbsp mound of dough and the real thing are in slight disagreement.

⁷ Although sooner is not out of the question.

Quick updates

2011-05-02T13:33:00.003-04:00

...both essential, but in different ways.

Guys Lit Wire (led by the ever-awesome Colleen Mondor) has just announced the school for this year's book drive. Read all the details, and give these kids some books! (Self-indulgent side note: after years of reading the Post regularly, despite being nowhere near a Washingtonian, I was actually familiar with Ballou before GLW chose it -- thanks to articles like this one. Isn't it great that even outsider's are familiar with DC's "worst high school in the city"?)
Kelly Fineman, the inspiration for my Jane Eyre-athon efforts, is now blogging her way through Emma. If you're not already subscribed to Writing & Ruminating, get on it.

(Post pic: taken along Mass Ave in Cambridge. Allowable use of an adverb? Your call.)

The Men of L'Engle #3: Wally Austin

2011-04-28T21:51:00.007-04:00

Yup, the L'Engle dads get their turn in this series. (In other words, Alex Murry is next.)

Wally Austin is a mild-mannered country doctor with a large, active family -- and just a touch of a Clark Kent-mystique vibe, thanks to this line that gets thrown out in The Moon by Night and then never developed:

"Daddy was a black belt in Judo before any of us was ever born."

There's also the bit where he trades in GP-ing for a year in New York, doing research that turns out to have huge organized crime/international/moral/biological implications, but that doesn't actually get much attention outside The Young Unicorns.

Leading characteristics:

Bears a passing resemblance to Ward Cleaver. To be fair, the Austin books were written over a period of 30 or 40 years, and his more objectionable attitudes aren't around in the later books. That said, he still doesn't get a pass for objecting to women who wear pants.
Excellent sense of humor. Because how can you not admire a guy who'll dress up as his own (nonexistent) butler just for the purpose of messing with his brother's girlfriend?
Serious family values. This is a guy who will relocate the whole family for the summer to be with his ailing father-in-law. It's not just the nuclear family that matters here.

Pull quote(s):

"He was old-fashioned enough to have given his seat to an elderly woman and modern enough to make sure that it was she and not somebody else who got it."
"... could always concentrate better with a pencil or pen in his fingers"

The Men of L'Engle #2: John Austin

2011-04-28T19:36:00.005-04:00

Today's L'Engle male is one who was never presented as a romantic lead in the books he appeared in -- because his little sister was doing the narration.

But there's still enough information about John Austin for an outsider to get a sense of what Izzy Jenkins sees in him.

John makes at least a passing appearance in all the Austin books. He's the reason Adam Eddington practically joins the family (don't get your hopes up; Adam doesn't get his turn for a while), and basically he serves as a solid, down-to-earth foil to Vicky (kind of like Suzy, only John's loads less annoying).

Leading characteristics:

Nerd. In the most adorable way, though -- when we first meet him, he's a high school kid who's built a spacesuit in the barn. And then he goes off to MIT to study astrophysics -- plus pre-med, just because.
Protective big brother. He lets Vicky and Suzy do their own thing, and they squabble a bit, but he's got everyone's back.
Not a fan of Zachary Gray. And probably not just because of the she's-my-little-sister thing. (Ah, Zachary, we'll get to you later. Stop trying to take over all the other entries.)

Pull quote(s):

"Okay, so maybe I am old-fashioned, but I don't want just a relationship. Relationships aren't real unless they end in bed, and they don't have to go any further than that. What I want is the real thing, and I'm not ready for it yet."
"Don't let him be too important to you, Vic. You're too young."
"Hold it while I get my glasses. I was so scared I forgot them."

So where's John now? Being a Boston resident, I'd like to think he stuck around Cambridge, and is currently working on a post-doc at the CFA. He stays in touch with his family, but doesn't plan on going back to Thornhill. He's still not ready for "the real thing," as he puts it, but once he gets a few more papers published, he might have time for romance. I still haven't decided whether he went with Lasik, for convenience, or whether he's rocking a pair of black hipster glasses. (I was trying to find a picture of the Apollo 13 character I think he resembles, but apparently no one else found him as adorable as I did.)

Tell you one thing, though: he's welcome to borrow a book any time.

Percolating blog posts

2011-04-25T22:14:00.004-04:00

In addition to the ongoing Men of L'Engle series (new installment on the way soon!) and the upcoming chapter-by-chapter blogging of Anne of Green Gables (which still needs a clever name), there are some big-picture posts that I've been thinking about, but haven't fully pulled together:

Making my way through the kids' nonfiction section of the library (back in the day)
How eight years of tech and journalism innovation the world of Naked in Baghdad and the Tunisia/Egypt/Libya/Syria/Bahrain/Yemen conflicts
Why melancholy, brooding characters are so attractive (both to their romantic interest and to the reader/viewer)

So, one of these days. Got a favorite? Feel free to nag, and it goes to the top of the pile.

(Post pic is me holding the newborn Codename: Princesa, ages ago. Just because I like the lighting. And this blog can always use more images.)

Chapter 38: The end (finally!)

2011-04-08T16:07:00.000-04:00

Finally.

38/38.

Jane and Rochester are married.

St. John is not.

Rochester eventually gets his sight back.

There are many little Rochesters running around, so the dynasty continues.

And, all together now: "Reader, I married him."

Chapter 37: We'd be nowhere without some misunderstandings

2011-04-07T15:31:00.000-04:00

The previous chapter was basically just necessary background, but now we get to the meat of the story.

Jane gets to observe Rochester before she interacts with him. If she weren't already in love with him, I think she'd be unlikely to start now. This is Beauty & the Beast when the Beast has gone back to eating with his hands and clawing ancient tapestries.

So, naturally, the best way to announce to your blind and cantankerous ex-fiance that you've returned is to sneak up on him.

"When you go in," said I, "tell your master that a person wishes to speak to him, but do not give my name."

How does Rochester finally convince himself it's not a dream? Well, when kissing and embracing doesn't do it:

"My uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds."

"Ah! this is practical—this is real!" he cried: "I should never dream that. Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers, so animating and piquant, as well as soft: it cheers my withered heart; it puts life into it.—What, Janet! Are you an independent woman? A rich woman?"

Money talks.

Not everything gets cleared up right away -- they both hold back from discussing whether marriage should be a part of their ongoing relationship. But Jane definitely wants to stick around.

"I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my cicatrised visage."

"Did you? Don’t tell me so—lest I should say something disparaging to your judgment."

And this is why we love her:

"Am I hideous, Jane?"

"Very, sir: you always were, you know."

They spend the next day very much together ("I sought a seat for him in a hidden and lovely spot, a dry stump of a tree; nor did I refuse to let him, when seated, place me on his knee. Why should I, when both he and I were happier near than apart?"), which naturally leads to Rochester assuming that she's going to marry St. John.

Look, she doesn't love him for his mind, okay?

The upshot:

"The third day from this must be our wedding-day, Jane. Never mind fine clothes and jewels, now: all that is not worth a fillip."

Just imagine if he'd been that tractable ten chapters ago.

Chapter 36: A blackened ruin

2011-04-06T15:20:00.000-04:00

Having heard Rochester's voice from some far-off place the night before, Jane's up early, ready to set off and search for him. And after 36 hours on the road, she reaches the neighborhood of Thornfield.

She decides not to ask for news of the household, but sets out and walks the two miles to her former home. Only there's a bit of a surprise when she gets there:

I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.

She returns to the inn and gets the full story from the former butler. As he is not the most concise of storytellers, here's a precis:

Rochester kicked everyone out and shut himself up at Thornfield after Jane left. One night Grace was drunk and Bertha escaped the third floor, and took the opportunity to set some fires. Which spread. Rochester got everyone out of the house, then went back for Bertha. Bertha died, and Rochester ended up blind and missing one hand.

The ex-butler reveals that Rochester is now living at Ferndean, which is 30 miles away. Suddenly that distance is nothing to our well-traveled heroine.

Chapter 35: A last-minute reprieve

2011-04-05T14:43:00.000-04:00

Did I mention that St. John has some abuser potential?

He deferred his departure a whole week, and during that time he made me feel what severe punishment a good yet stern, a conscientious yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended him.

Are we all in agreement that Jane should so not be marrying him?

This is why it's hard to like St. John. He's off to do good works, but he's just so squicky and manipulative.

Luckily, Jane sees this:

"Once more, why this refusal?" he asked.

"Formerly," I answered, "because you did not love me; now, I reply, because you almost hate me. If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now."

And then he tries to convince her she should go to India with some acquaintances of his, since it would be breaking a promise (which she totally didn't make) to not go.

"There is no dishonour, no breach of promise, no desertion in the case. I am not under the slightest obligation to go to India, especially with strangers."

So St. John turns mean, though he no doubt thinks he's just being frank:

"I know where your heart turns and to what it clings. The interest you cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to have crushed it: now you should blush to allude to it. You think of Mr. Rochester?"

But still, St. John's got a forceful personality, and Jane might just be convinced, if he presses the right moral buttons. But as she's standing there thinking that maybe she'll go ahead and marry him if it seems like it's the right thing to do, she hears a disembodied voice calling from elsewhere.

It belongs, of course, to Rochester.

Chapter 34: Jane receives a second proposal

2011-04-04T13:59:00.000-04:00

Which is not the only thing that happens in this chapter. Everyone comes home and they all move back into Moor House. Jane quits teaching. Jane starts learning Hindi because St. John doesn't want to study alone. Jane writes to ask Mrs. Fairfax what's up with Rochester, and is despondent when six months go by without an answer.

And early on, Jane reaches this conclusion:

As I looked at his lofty forehead, still and pale as a white stone—at his fine lineaments fixed in study—I comprehended all at once that he would hardly make a good husband: that it would be a trying thing to be his wife.

So are we at all surprised when St. John, still in Edward Cullen mode ("There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin’s salute belonged to one of these classes"), asks Jane to marry him?

Well, sort of. He wants her to go to India with him as a fellow missionary, and his sense of morality demands that they be married before traveling together.

St. John's proposal is the emotional opposite of Rochester's earlier in the book. It's closer to that of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, minus the absurdities. He spends paragraphs laying out all the reasons Jane would make a decent missionary.

Jane takes some time to think it over, soliloquizing all the while. There are a load of reasons for her not to accept:

"If I join St. John, I abandon half myself"
"He will never love me; but he shall approve me"
"He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon; and that is all."
"Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous."

Her alternative: she'll go to India as his helper, but not his wife.

St. John's response to that: yes to the first, no to the second, and oh, by the way, let me demonstrate my utter unreasonableness and abusive potential.

The way he sees it, Jane's agreed to go to India with him. And he'll repeat that as many times as necessary. Never mind that she hasn't actually committed to going, or that she's absolutely refused to marry him, or that he's just a touch unyielding about his version.

"To do so, you must have a coadjutor: not a brother—that is a loose tie—but a husband. I, too, do not want a sister: a sister might any day be taken from me. I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death."

What every girl wants to hear, let me tell you.

Jane's answer: "Oh! I will give my heart to God," I said. "You do not want it."

Bah, says St. John. You'll love me eventually, more or less.

"I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it."

We have reached, as I believe it is termed, an impasse.

Chapter 33: Jane finds a fortune

2011-04-03T13:34:00.000-04:00

The chapter opens with St. John making his way through a storm to visit Jane -- and at first it appears it's for no purpose other than to demonstrate his Edward Cullen skills.

I had never seen that handsome-featured face of his look more like chiselled marble than it did just now, as he put aside his snow-wet hair from his forehead and let the firelight shine free on his pale brow and cheek as pale, where it grieved me to discover the hollow trace of care or sorrow now so plainly graved.

But no. Instead, it's storytime, as he begins to narrate a history that should sound quite familiar to anyone who's been paying attention thus far:

"Twenty years ago, a poor curate—never mind his name at this moment—fell in love with a rich man’s daughter; she fell in love with him, and married him, against the advice of all her friends, who consequently disowned her immediately after the wedding. Before two years passed, the rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly side by side under one slab. (I have seen their grave; it formed part of the pavement of a huge churchyard surrounding the grim, soot-black old cathedral of an overgrown manufacturing town in ---shire.) They left a daughter, which, at its very birth, Charity received in her lap—cold as that of the snow-drift I almost stuck fast in to-night. Charity carried the friendless thing to the house of its rich maternal relations; it was reared by an aunt-in-law, called (I come to names now) Mrs. Reed of Gateshead. You start—did you hear a noise? I daresay it is only a rat scrambling along the rafters of the adjoining schoolroom: it was a barn before I had it repaired and altered, and barns are generally haunted by rats.—To proceed. Mrs. Reed kept the orphan ten years: whether it was happy or not with her, I cannot say, never having been told; but at the end of that time she transferred it to a place you know—being no other than Lowood School, where you so long resided yourself. It seems her career there was very honourable: from a pupil, she became a teacher, like yourself—really it strikes me there are parallel points in her history and yours—she left it to be a governess: there, again, your fates were analogous; she undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr. Rochester."

(Side note: I love the narration here because it's so much more arch than is typical for St. John. "Did you hear a noise?")

You remember that slip of paper he absconded with in the previous chapter? He noticed that Jane signed her real name to one of the paintings she'd been working on -- and that name just happened to be that of the cousin who inherited the great-uncle's family wealth. (We've gone back about three chapters here. This was the bit where the chapter ended with the Rivers siblings finding out they were cut out of the will.)

So to sum up: Jane has just inherited 20,000 pounds. But she's more interested in a) the fact that Rochester came up several times in the conversation, though St. John didn't actually have any information about him, and b) Jane the Lonely now has a family, in the form of her Rivers cousins.

She much prefers family to wealth, so (after much contention) the inheritance is divided among the four cousins: they have 5,000 apiece, and no one has to go out and work any longer.

I need not narrate in detail the further struggles I had, and arguments I used, to get matters regarding the legacy settled as I wished. My task was a very hard one; but, as I was absolutely resolved—as my cousins saw at length that my mind was really and immutably fixed on making a just division of the property—as they must in their own hearts have felt the equity of the intention; and must, besides, have been innately conscious that in my place they would have done precisely what I wished to do—they yielded at length so far as to consent to put the affair to arbitration. The judges chosen were Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer: both coincided in my opinion: I carried my point. The instruments of transfer were drawn out: St. John, Diana, Mary, and I, each became possessed of a competency.

Chapter 32: Poor Miss Oliver!

2011-04-02T13:09:00.000-04:00

You remember Jane's "par parenthese" from back in Chapter 12? She's not overly fond of children, and she's certainly not about to flatter them. But she's beginning to find some admirable qualities among her new pupils; they are no longer (at least not all of them) "hopelessly dull."

Jane's settling into her village existence, and even enjoying it on some level -- though she's very clear about the fact that she is totally not yet over Rochester.

Also of interest: Miss Oliver starts hanging out with Jane, who finds her not particularly interesting, but not bad company either. And she knows that she's not the primary draw: Rosamond Oliver has a thing for St. John Rivers, but he's fully focused on his becoming-a-missionary plan. Jane tries to meddle a bit and get him to admit that he has a bit of a thing for Miss Oliver too, but St. John is the epitome of self-control.

Seriously, self-control, or something. How can you not love a man who responds thus to hearing that the beautiful rich woman finds him appealing?

"It is very pleasant to hear this," he said—"very: go on for another quarter of an hour." And he actually took out his watch and laid it upon the table to measure the time.

And I have to grant St. John this: he's one of the most self-aware characters in the book.

"Know me to be what I am—a cold hard man."

*cough*Edward Cullen*cough*

However (foreshadowing ahoy!), he does have some skill in concealment:

I saw him dexterously tear a narrow slip from the margin. It disappeared in his glove; and, with one hasty nod and "good-afternoon," he vanished.

Chapter 31: Scene-setting ahoy!

2011-04-01T17:33:00.000-04:00

What happens in this chapter?

Jane acknowledges her class snobbery:

I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant; but others are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me. I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born.

Jane decides she made the right choice:

Meantime, let me ask myself one question—Which is better?—To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort—no struggle;—but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester’s mistress; delirious with his love half my time—for he would—oh, yes, he would have loved me well for a while.... Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles—fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next—or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?

St. John proves he has no future in marketing:

"But perhaps your accommodations—your cottage—your furniture—have disappointed your expectations?"
"But you feel solitude an oppression? The little house there behind you is dark and empty."
"It is too soon yet to yield to the vacillating fears of Lot’s wife.
"A last conflict with human weakness, in which I know I shall overcome, because I have vowed that I will overcome."

We meet Miss Oliver:

What happy combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?

Chapter 30: Jane settles in

2011-03-31T16:16:00.000-04:00

Conveniently, the opening line of this chapter also makes for a pretty good summary: "The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them."

I admit to being guilty of the same thing most of the movie adaptations have done (credit for that insight goes to a Times article): I pretty much skip over the Moor House section. True, it's nearly a third of the book. But it's booooooring! We've set the Rochester plot aside for a while. To be fair, there are some loose ends tied up and some positioning that makes the resolution possible, but (and I think this is the crux of it) no matter how hard I try, I just can't find St. John likable, so I rush through this section.

However, we are giving each chapter the dignity it deserves, so I will not skip to the end.

Jane's quite at home with Diana and Mary, but St. John's always busy, and not exactly personable, so she doesn't really get a chance to know him -- which is why she's amazed when she listens to him preach:

It began calm—and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it was calm to the end: an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language. This grew to force—compressed, condensed, controlled. The heart was thrilled, the mind astonished, by the power of the preacher: neither were softened. Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines—election, predestination, reprobation—were frequent; and each reference to these points sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom. When he had done, instead of feeling better, calmer, more enlightened by his discourse, I experienced an inexpressible sadness; for it seemed to me—I know not whether equally so to others—that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment—where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations.

St. John also finds a job for Jane, though he goes about offering it in the most backhanded way possible:

"I have nothing eligible or profitable to suggest."
"I can offer you but a service of poverty and obscurity."
"You shall hear how poor the proposal is,—how trivial—how cramping."
"Your scholars will be only poor girls—cottagers’ children—at the best, farmers’ daughters."

But it gives Jane the opportunity to earn as much as she made teaching Adele, while continuing to hide out, so she accepts.

And then the chapter ends with a scene that doesn't quite mean anything yet, but will soon: the Riverses have lost their uncle, but he left his wealth to another relative.

Three guesses.

Chapter 29: Meet the Rivers family

2011-03-30T13:45:00.000-04:00

Ten more chapters! We can do this!

Okay, after last chapter's collapse, Jane is out of it for a while. Happily, Jane-the-narrator is able to report on some of the bedside conversations she overhears from her protectors. Which means we get to hear this tidbit from St. John (which, by the way, is pronounced Sinjin). Considering how his character is developed, this is the kind of thing I wouldn't be surprised to hear him say to Jane's face, but at the moment, he thinks she's sleeping:

"That is hardly likely," was the reply. "You will find she is some young lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends, and has probably injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability." He stood considering me some minutes; then added, "She looks sensible, but not at all handsome."

St. John, on the other hand, is pretty much the textbook example of handsome. Not that he cares.

Jane finally gets moving again, and heads to the kitchen, where she has a little tiff with Hannah, the housekeeper. Miss Eyre does not consider herself a beggar (despite the fact that she was, in fact, begging in the last chapter), and she sets Hannah straight on her position in the social hierarchy.

This is the kind of stuff that leads people to call Jane Eyre a fundamentally conservative book, while others focus on the proto-feminism and Jane's independent spirit and some of the narrator's more open-minded opinions.

Once order has been restored, Hannah provides an overview of the household: St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers, all recently orphaned adults. St. John is the local minister, and the girls work as governesses.

When Jane has her first conversation with them, she pretty much refuses to tell anything about herself:

"The name of the place where, and of the person with whom I lived, is my secret," I replied concisely.

The Men of L'Engle #1: Paul Laurens

2011-03-30T13:15:00.002-04:00

We're starting out easy here in the Men of L'Engle Project*. Paul Laurens appears in just one book, And Both Were Young. No multi-book character arcs to discuss here, just one of L'Engle's early creations.

Fair warning: Expect spoilers in these posts. It's kind of hard to analyze characters without giving away plot. If you're lagging behind on your L'Engle reading, get caught up, then come back here.

And Both Were Young is mostly set in an all-girl Swiss boarding school, but Paul manages to score plenty of page time, starting when main character Flip runs into him (literally) at a chateau they're both visiting.

Leading characteristics:

Doesn't like "institutions." At first, this gives him a good excuse to be hanging out with his free-range father when Flip goes wandering off campus. Later revealed to be the result of concentration camp-induced PTSD.
Good at skiing. And teaching skiing. To Flip.
Interested in medicine. Shows promise (has treated many animals), but interest conflicts with his disinclination to go to school.
The strong, silent, moody type. "There was always grief in his eyes."

Pull quote(s):

"I knew right away that I liked you, so I never bothered to think why."

And Both Were Young is a fairly straightforward and sweet coming-of-age story, and both those adjectives also apply to Paul. It's hard to imagine him doing anything to hurt Flip (oh, Zachary, we will get to you later) or upset the space-time continuum.

We know from the appearance of one of her portraits in a later book that Flip does realize her dream of becoming an artist, but since she herself isn't present, we don't know anything about her personal life. It could go either way, I think. Either she and Paul are about to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary, after a lifetime of dividing themselves between New York and Paris, or else Flip still pulls out a silver necklace once in a while, and smiles when she thinks back on her first love.

*And if you've got a better name, seriously, send it along.

Chapter 28: Jane alone

2011-03-29T10:46:00.001-04:00

So Jane's not just broke and in unfamiliar territory here -- she also managed to leave her parcel behind in the coach that brought her away from Thornfield, so she's pretty much got nothing but the clothes on her back.

Jane-the-narrator is back to present-tense scene-setting here, giving you a sense of how desperate she's feeling:

Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment—not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are—none that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.

This isn't the glorious Romantic natural world here. It's Jane's last resort, and it's a cruel world.

Even though she was neglected by the Reeds and has been working for her living, Jane's retained her place among the gentry (though at the bottom of it) by virtue of her father's clergyman status. When she finds herself without money, connections, or any idea what she's going to do, she's also lost that class protection.

(Sort of. Even though she's bedraggled, she's still wearing decent-quality clothes, and when she breaks down and begs some food from a farmer, she assumes that he still considers her a lady of some sort.)

Time for some historical context here, in two parts: the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws. This is the part where I get to prove I learned stuff in my semester of graduate school.

The Corn Laws were in effect for the first half of the nineteenth century, and served to keep the price of grain artificially high, mostly through import restrictions. ("Corn" referred to all kinds of grains, not just what we apply the word to today. The English were eating corn long before they encountered maize in their North American settlements.)

Semantics aside, the result was that high grain prices meant high food prices -- in other words, the Corn Laws benefited the landowning agricultural class at the expense of the poor (and the emerging middle class).

And the Poor Laws didn't help matters. Here we jump out of the story's chronology for a minute, because it's likely that Bronte's description of Jane's experience was shaped by political events in the years before Jane Eyre was published. (For reference, the book was published in 1847, but the story takes place twenty or so years earlier.)

Poor Laws had been around for centuries at this point, regulating relief payments to the needy, who were considered the responsibility of the parish they lived in. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment was passed. It created the workhouse (pace Dickens).

If you needed relief, the workhouse became your only option, but a) if you had any ability to work, regardless of how little you had the potential to earn, you didn't qualify, but still couldn't get help elsewhere, and b) the people in charge were determined to make the workhouse the most miserable experience ever, on the theory that nineteenth century England was largely populated by Ronald Reagan's welfare queens.

This, by way of summary of what Jane's facing as she's wandering around the countryside, is my five-paragraph summary of a fabulously informative 800-page book, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. If you're at all interested in what the Regency and early Victorian years were like for the people who only rarely got speaking roles in Jane Austen's books, pick this up.

Returning to the story: Jane's wandering takes her to a house; she eavesdrops on two girls and a housekeeper for a while. When she knocks and asks for help, the housekeeper is unsympathetic, but the man of the house appears and says she can stay. Jane is thoroughly worn out, but not too tired to pick a pseudonym, so as far as her new protectors know, she's Jane Elliott.

Chapter 27: "Reader, I forgave him"

2011-03-28T18:28:00.001-04:00

Yes, that line actually appears in this chapter, sort of a variation on what's become one of the more famous lines in English lit -- which we'll get to in Chapter 38.

For now, though, Jane emerges from her room, where it turns out Rochester's been parked outside the door waiting. He moans a bit and asks forgiveness, and she gives it.

(Full disclosure: If you like, you can blame my cynicism about the instant forgiveness on my bitter-old-maid status. I still don't think I'd have let Rochester off that easily.)

To be fair, Jane gives us a pretty clear look into her state of mind: "I must leave him, it appears. I do not want to leave him—I cannot leave him." But while she's thinking this, outwardly she's got her priorities straight: Rochester is married to someone else, so there will be no more kissing.

Rochester, who thinks he's going to cart Jane off with him to his even-more-remote house at Thorndean, isn't too pleased when she objects to the idea, which brings us to one of the reasons my sympathies are not with Rochester here:

"Jane! will you hear reason?" (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear); "because, if you won’t, I’ll try violence." His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license.

The Penguin Classics editors note that "violence," in this context, means rape. I don't care how upset you are about having your wedding interrupted, it's still inexcusable. (Also, it prompts the reader to reconsider Jane's whole "when I'm saucy instead of sappy I can control him" thing from earlier chapters.)

Then he tries the "you didn't want me, you just wanted my money" tack:

"You don’t love me, then? It was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued?"

Charming, isn't he? Rochester gets over himself a bit, calms down, and goes back to his "well, of course we'll be together" plan:

"As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester—both virtually and nominally."

Which, as Jane points out, would so not be the case. Even if Rochester doesn't want to believe he's married, there's a little piece of paper that says otherwise.

(Historical note: Jane Eyre is set well before the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. The only way Rochester could have divorced Bertha was by petitioning Parliament -- and while he's shown as a wealthy man, it's never suggested that he has that kind of influence.)

This finally leads to Rochester giving a full summary of his history with Bertha, since he thinks Jane will agree with him once she has all the facts. Short version: The Rochester estate was entailed on his older brother, but in order not to leave his second son destitute, Rochester Senior arranged a marriage with a Miss Mason with 30,000 pounds. Rochester met her after everything had been agreed to; she was pretty; he went ahead with it.

(Side note: Emma Woodhouse's fortune was also 30,000 pounds. Emma is, I believe, more or less contemporary with Rochester's marriage. I would not be surprised to learn that fanfiction has already explored this coincidence.)

Short version continued: Rochester hated Bertha pretty much from the start. He ended up inheriting everything anyway, but was stuck with his wife, who ended up mad. He decided to move back to England, secretly lock her up in Thornfield, and enjoy himself on the Continent. And while it wasn't his plan to take up with one mistress after another, "I could not live alone."

But although Rochester enjoyed his mistresses' company at the time, he makes his utter disdain for them pretty clear, which Jane picks up on:

I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as—under any pretext—with any justification—through any temptation—to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory.

Which is why, when he once again insists that the two of them should run off to the Riviera together, she's strong enough to say no.

"Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise—'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.'"

"Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours."

Instead, she packs a back and sneaks out.

Chapter 26: Mawwiage is what bwings us togethah today

2011-03-27T17:45:00.005-04:00

It's Jane's wedding day. The happiest day of every girl's life.

Or, y'know, the day she finds out her husband-to-be was actually planning to become a bigamist.

(Side note: For a book that deals with bigamy from the various sides of the relationship -- basically, it's a family story, plus a damn fine read -- put Tayari Jones' Silver Sparrow on your list. It's out at the end of May, and it's awesome.)

Everything is in readiness (and we get a bit of checklist-dialogue to prove it), and Jane and Rochester make their way to the Thornfield church, with Jane taking note of her fiance's expression:

I wonder what other bridegroom ever looked as he did—so bent up to a purpose, so grimly resolute: or who, under such steadfast brows, ever revealed such flaming and flashing eyes.

Perhaps it's not the happiest day of Rochester's life.

The minister makes his way through the service, and things are good until we get to that bit about an impediment.

As in "the marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment."

It's our old friend Mr. Mason, recovered from his attack in Chapter 20, and back to have his say. Well, actually he's letting his solicitor have his say, to the effect that, as Ellen the maid says in Mary Poppins, "the position 'as been filled."

"And you would thrust on me a wife?"

"I would remind you of your lady’s existence, sir, which the law recognises, if you do not."

There's already a Mrs. Rochester, something her husband managed to leave out in the course of romancing his governess. He tries to bluff it out, objecting to the evidence the solicitor brings up -- after all, even if he once had a wife, that doesn't mean she's still around -- but when Mason reveals himself, Rochester knows he's pretty well screwed.

"Wood, close your book and take off your surplice; John Green (to the clerk), leave the church: there will be no wedding to-day."

And therewith is delivered a big slap in the face to everyone who picked this up expecting it to be a romance. Just in case we haven't covered this: Jane Eyre and Jane Austen are both awesome, but you've got to be prepared for totally different genres. (And Austen's a brilliant satirist and prose stylist, not just a romance writer, but that's a whole other series.)

The whole party decamps to the house, Rochester holding onto Jane the whole time, and ascends to the mysterious third floor. (Typing that phrase, I wonder if this is where Ann M. Martin got the idea for Karen Brewer's bête noir in the Babysitters Club books.)

For those who aren't familiar with the story of Bertha Mason, here are the pull quotes:

"Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard... Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points."
"What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face."
"She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest—more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was."

Got all that?

And just in case we haven't added enough family connections in this chapter, Bronte throws us one more: Mason and Jane's uncle share an employer.

Jane goes back to her room, pretty sure that Rochester never loved her in the first place, and is now ready to call it a go. You may not be surprised to learn she's far from pleased with that, though she doesn't see any other possibilities.

Chapter 25: Ominous forebodings ahead

2011-03-24T09:08:00.002-04:00

In terms of plot, not a whole lot happens in this chapter: it's mostly stage-setting for the melodrama that follows.

It's the day before the wedding, and Jane's looking over the already-tagged trunks that they'll be taking on their honeymoon -- and she's not too sure about the label on hers.

Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist: she would not be born till to-morrow, some time after eight o’clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property.

The foreshadowing music starts... now!

Jane putters around the house and grounds, then finally goes out in a storm to meet Rochester. She's got something on her mind -- plus she wants to see him.

First, Jane tells him about the odd dreams she's been having. And then the definitely-not-a-dream part:

"It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell."

"Did you see her face?"

"Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass."

(If this were a modern work, I'd make snarky reference to the obligatory vampire mention here. But I think we can be pretty sure Charlotte Bronte's not making a Twilight reference -- otherwise Rochester would sparkle.)

Rochester mostly tries to laugh it off, but he also tells her to go sleep in Adele's room. Next up: their wedding day, on which we can all deliver a collective smack to Rochester.

Chapter 24: This is why long engagements are discouraged

2011-03-23T12:15:00.002-04:00

They're engaged! Birds are singing, mice are hard at work on a dress -- wait. Wrong story.

They're engaged, and everything is wonderful. Except not.

Jane is simultaneously blissful and terrified when she thinks about the fact that she's about to marry Rochester. And he's not helping by insisting that it's now his prerogative to shower her with brocade and diamonds.

"Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not have them."

While Jane wants to be practical, Rochester has his own plans for married life:

"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph’s foot shall step also. Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel as my comforter."

Uh huh. Our girl's take:

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,—a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,—like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less."

Show of hands: which scenario is more plausible?

(Side note: Really, Charlotte, you had to throw in that bit of casual antisemitism there? It's not even an accurate reference -- since Esther never asked for half of Ahasuerus' kingdom; he just kept offering it -- and it's so totally unnecessary.)

Elsewhere in the chapter: Mrs. Fairfax is rather shocked at the idea of the governess marrying the employer; there is a shopping trip; Jane announces that she has no intention of being treated like Celine Varens; Rochester whines; Jane takes action:

"I like you more than I can say; but I’ll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I’ll keep you from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual advantage."

...

He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as “love” and “darling” on his lips: the best words at my service were “provoking puppet,” “malicious elf,” “sprite,” “changeling,” &c. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender.

Chapter 23: "Do you think I am an automaton?"

2011-03-21T09:16:00.003-04:00

No, I haven't seen the 2011 movie version of this scene yet, but now that the movie has been released in Boston...

It's hard to be of one mind about this chapter. Yes, it's one of the great proposal scenes, with Jane declaring herself just as much as Rochester does - but I don't love it so much that I'm willing to overlook Rochester's needless duplicity here.

Anyway.

Jane's out wandering the Thornfield grounds, treating us to a Romantic aside about all the nature she's encountering (or perhaps that should be Nature, as we're definitely in a Noble Ideas frame of mind here), when she runs into Rochester, who she's been trying to avoid.

Rochester won't let her leave. And then he starts in on how she'll have to leave Thornfield when he marries, and how lovely his Blanche is, and how he's already found a new situation for Jane in Ireland.

Jane is a little less iron-willed than usual, and finally gives into tears at the idea of going so far away. So what does Rochester do? He pulls out this gem:

"My bride! What bride? I have no bride!"

In other words, he lies on two levels -- about his previous bride, and about his current plans. So not seeing a justification for this.

Except for this: it gives Jane an excuse to make one of the great speeches of this book.

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!

Damn straight.

And then that paragraph is followed by this one (well, first there's a kiss), in which Jane continues to show her mettle, plus we get some foreshadowing:

"Yes, so, sir," I rejoined: "and yet not so; for you are a married man—or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you—to one with whom you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you—let me go!"

So much for being equals. So how does Rochester respond to that speech? He proposes, and I don't blame Jane one bit for not believing him.

"I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions."

"You play a farce, which I merely laugh at."

"I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion."

"For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it."

Smart girl, that. But she starts to believe him, "beginning in his earnestness—and especially in his incivility—to credit his sincerity."

In just a bit we'll find out whether or not she's still a smart girl.

Chapter 22: Wouldn't this be better with an Alan Menken score?

2011-03-17T08:01:00.003-04:00

We begin this chapter with a line that (at least to me) seems like an allusion to Beauty and the Beast:

Mr. Rochester had given me but one week’s leave of absence: yet a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead.

Can't you just picture the ring turning on her finger, or Robby Benson gazing despondently into the magic mirror? No? Just me? Okay then.

Jane extends her stay at Gateshead because she's being good to her worthless cousins, and giving Bronte the opportunity to tie up all loose ends with the Reed family -- Eliza ends up in a convent, we learn, and Georgiana marries well, and Jane's done with them.

A brief aside as we follow Jane back to Thornfield, now -- this, people, is metaphor:

And then I strangled a new-born agony—a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear—and ran on.

We switch back to the stage-setting present tense as Jane narrates her approach, which brings her face-to-face with Rochester, who's sitting on the stile, blocking her path.

And while I'm so not willing to overlook the way Rochester's messing with Jane here, as he starts talking to her about the future Mrs. Rochester -- by which Jane assumes he means Blanche, of course -- I do have to smile at this exchange:

"Tell me now, fairy as you are—can’t you give me a charm, or a philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"

"It would be past the power of magic, sir"

You tell him, Jane.

From the Better-Late Files: An Old-Fashioned Girl

2011-03-15T09:53:00.003-04:00

Finally got around to An Old-Fashioned Girl, rather a bit later for Mitali's cuci mata reading.

Not much to add to the questions and critiques Gail Gauthier raised back in December, except to say this:

Despite all the heavy-handed Important Life Lessons in the book (and Polly's pronounced Pollyanna tendencies), I was totally hooked on the relationships between the characters. I had to find out if Polly and Tom were going to end up together, and if Fanny was ever going to get over herself.

And on a related note, I much preferred the second half of the story to the first.

Chapter 21: In which multiple narrative purposes are served

2011-03-15T09:02:00.002-04:00

You thought Jane had put the Reeds behind her? Alas, no -- she still feels an obligation to them, so when Robert Leaven, her aunt's coachman, shows up to request her presence for some family drama, she goes.

Let's take a look all the different ways this trip fits into the story:

Loose ends are tied up. I suppose Bronte could have just left the Reeds in Jane's past, but here they're dispatched with (in John Reed's case, literally).

The romantic tension moves offstage. After all their recent moments, Jane and Rochester are about to spend some time apart -- and she knows she's leaving him with Blanche. Without this physical separation, it's hard to imagine Bronte would have been able to stretch out the length of time their relationship remains unsettled.

Jane gets to explain Rochester to a stranger. And what does she tell Bessie about him?

I told her he was rather an ugly man, but quite a gentleman; and that he treated me kindly, and I was content.

We get to see how Jane's grown up. Her cousins are still rather obnoxious to her, but this isn't the fly-into-a-temper Jane of the opening chapters. She's a bit above all that now.

Jane gets an honest answer to why her aunt has always hated her. Even if it's a really dumb reason, at least she knows.

A Very Important future plot point is introduced. It takes the form of a letter:

“Madam,—Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane Eyre, and to tell me how she is? It is my intention to write shortly and desire her to come to me at Madeira. Providence has blessed my endeavours to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at my death whatever I may have to leave.—I am, Madam, &c., &c.,

“John Eyre, Madeira.”

Chapter 20: In which we are reminded that this is as much a horror story as a romance

2011-03-13T09:20:00.002-04:00

Just in case you'd been lulled into thinking Jane Eyre was all about love across employer-employee boundaries, Chapter 20 pops in to remind you of all the other stuff generally associated with Gothic novels - the totally non-romantic stuff.

Jane, who forgot to pull the curtains before going to bed, is woken by a full moon shining in her window (been there!), just in time to hear a cry from the third floor of the house:

Indeed, whatever being uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it: not the widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie. The thing delivering such utterance must rest ere it could repeat the effort.

It's followed by sounds of a scuffle, so naturally the entire house party pours out into the hall to find out what's up. Can't you just picture the ladies here?

"What awful event has taken place?" said she. "Speak! let us know the worst at once!"

"But don’t pull me down or strangle me," he replied: for the Misses Eshton were clinging about him now; and the two dowagers, in vast white wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail.

"All’s right!—all’s right!" he cried. "It’s a mere rehearsal of Much Ado about Nothing. Ladies, keep off, or I shall wax dangerous."

Clearly, things can't be too bad if Rochester can indulge in snark.

But Jane knows it's not just someone's bad dream, so she gets dressed, figuring she's going to be needed. As she is -- Rochester turns up an hour later, and leads her upstairs.

Mr. Mason, the most recent arrival, has clearly been attacked. We don't get any more details, because Rochester, before dashing off again, absolutely forbids him to speak to Jane, and vice versa. And Mason is nothing if not obedient.

But even without discussion, Jane picks up on some of the mysteries of the situation:

And why, now, was he so tame under the violence or treachery done him? Why did he so quietly submit to the concealment Mr. Rochester enforced? Why did Mr. Rochester enforce this concealment? His guest had been outraged, his own life on a former occasion had been hideously plotted against; and both attempts he smothered in secrecy and sank in oblivion! Lastly, I saw Mr. Mason was submissive to Mr. Rochester; that the impetuous will of the latter held complete sway over the inertness of the former: the few words which had passed between them assured me of this. It was evident that in their former intercourse, the passive disposition of the one had been habitually influenced by the active energy of the other: whence then had arisen Mr. Rochester’s dismay when he heard of Mr. Mason’s arrival? Why had the mere name of this unresisting individual—whom his word now sufficed to control like a child—fallen on him, a few hours since, as a thunderbolt might fall on an oak?

And then the doctor shows up, and everyone's a bit less careful about conversation, which means Jane gets to learn that Mason's assailant

had a knife
also bit him
demonstrated vampiric tendencies
was deceptively quite at first

Again: we're in the horror part of the story now.

Rochester hustles Mason off as the sun rises, with Mason's exit following this exchange:

Mason: "Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let her—" he stopped and burst into tears.

Rochester: "I do my best; and have done it, and will do it," was the answer: he shut up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away.

Uh-huh. In a few chapters we'll find out just what Rochester considers his best.

Chapter 19: The Gypsy Trope

2011-03-11T10:58:00.003-05:00

Let me start this chapter by pointing out that I'm woefully unqualified to say much of anything about representations of Roma in English lit, except in the most general terms -- and as this Gypsy is not, in fact, Roma at all, I'm going to kind of skip over the quasi-blackface aspects of this scene.

Short version: Jane goes to see the Gypsy because her presence was requested, not out of any actual interest in hearing her fortune told. She's playing along, but considering the length of the conversation, it does seem to be a bit more than simple politeness.

Oh, let's stop being coy. The Gypsy soon reveals himself as Mr. Rochester, who for reasons surpassing understanding has decided that this is the best way to play host to a house party. He asks Jane if she's going to forgive him for messing with her, and our girl is nothing if not circumspect:

"I cannot tell till I have thought it all over. If, on reflection, I find I have fallen into no great absurdity, I shall try to forgive you; but it was not right."

And then Jane mentions, almost in passing, that the party grew by one during Rochester's supposed absence:

"His name is Mason, sir; and he comes from the West Indies; from Spanish Town, in Jamaica, I think."

Mr. Rochester was standing near me; he had taken my hand, as if to lead me to a chair. As I spoke he gave my wrist a convulsive grip; the smile on his lips froze: apparently a spasm caught his breath.

"Mason!—the West Indies!" he said, in the tone one might fancy a speaking automaton to enounce its single words; "Mason!—the West Indies!" he reiterated; and he went over the syllables three times, growing, in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes: he hardly seemed to know what he was doing.

Which leads to another moment in which Jane gets to be the strong, sensible one in this relationship.

"Oh, lean on me, sir."

"Jane, you offered me your shoulder once before; let me have it now."

"Yes, sir, yes; and my arm."

Indeed.

And with that, we reach the halfway point of the book!

Chapter 18: The population grows

2011-03-10T10:08:00.004-05:00

So. There are people at Thornfield. Lots of them -- which is quite a change from the last couple months.

We get a house party scene, as Jane watches Rochester and his guests play charades (and act out a sham marriage - what foreshadowing!) and generally banter.

Which means, of course, that she's watching Blanche and Rochester, fairly sure that a marriage is in the works -- even if Blanche clearly doesn't know Mr. R. as well as Jane does:

"Because, when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won."

We're very much in Jane's head here, as she ponders the nature of interpersonal relations, until a new character makes an appearance. Meet Mr. Mason:

the new-comer was called Mr. Mason; then I learned that he was but just arrived in England, and that he came from some hot country: which was the reason, doubtless, his face was so sallow, and that he sat so near the hearth, and wore a surtout in the house

And then there's one more addition to the house: a gypsy shows up, and offers to tell the young ladies' fortunes. Blanche, of course, is first. Jane stays out of the way until the gypsy specifically asks for her - which leads us into Chapter 19.

Chapter 17: Outsiders in Thornfield

2011-02-26T16:24:00.002-05:00

"You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield, further than to receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protégée, and to be grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty, you have a right to expect at his hands. Be sure that is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him; so don’t make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order: keep to your caste, and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised."

Sure, honey. That always works.

So Rochester is still away, and Jane's working on her don't-fall-in-love plan, when news arrives: a) Rochester has not hied off to the Continent like Mrs. Fairfax thought he might have done; in fact, b) he's going to be home in three days, c) bringing the house party with him.

So there's work to be done:

The three days were, as she had foretold, busy enough. I had thought all the rooms at Thornfield beautifully clean and well arranged; but it appears I was mistaken.... Mrs. Fairfax had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish desert-dishes.

(This sentiment makes an appearance in Daddy Long-Legs, separate from the overt references to Jane Eyre in that book:

Such a flutter as we are in! The whole house is being cleaned and all the curtains washed. I am driving to the Corners this morning to get some new oilcloth for the entry, and two cans of brown floor paint for the hall and back stairs. Mrs. Dowd is engaged to come tomorrow to wash the windows (in the exigency of the moment, we waive our suspicions in regard to the piglet). You might think, from this account of our activities, that the house was not already immaculate; but I assure you it was! Whatever Mrs. Semple's limitations, she is a HOUSEKEEPER.

What was that line about good writers copy, but great writers steal outright?)

The house party arrives, and Jane gets her first look at Blanche Ingram, who is every bit the beauty she's reputed to be. But she's also standard-issue mean girl, deliberately starting in on governesses - all of them - when Jane joins the group at Rochester's request.

Well, "request" is too mild a word. According to Mrs. Fairfax, what he actually said was

"If she objects, tell her it is my particular wish; and if she resists, say I shall come and fetch her in case of contumacy."

Pleasant man, that.

Let's take a break from speculation about Rochester's designs for a minute, and step in Jane's head, where we can admire Charlotte Bronte's prose. She switches from past to present tense here, something she does at a couple points in the book, as a kind of scene-setting:

At last coffee is brought in, and the gentlemen are summoned. I sit in the shade—if any shade there be in this brilliantly-lit apartment; the window-curtain half hides me. Again the arch yawns; they come. The collective appearance of the gentlemen, like that of the ladies, is very imposing: they are all costumed in black; most of them are tall, some young... I try to concentrate my attention on those netting-needles, on the meshes of the purse I am forming—I wish to think only of the work I have in my hands, to see only the silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap...

(Full credit, by the way, goes to the introduction in the Penguin Classics edition of the book - I'm not sure I would have noticed the tense shifts if the editor hadn't pointed them out.)

And then we see just how futile Jane's efforts in the beginning of the chapter were:

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Blanche, however? Not so much.

After the discourse on how to win friends and irritate governesses, we're treated to a Regency-esque (which is not to say that it seems ahistorical here; the 1830s just haven't developed their own literary ambience, y'know?) public flirtation between Blanche and Rochester, at which point Jane decides she's had enough.

Chapter 16: Midnight disturbance? What midnight disturbance?

2011-02-17T19:29:00.004-05:00

"I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed this sleepless night: I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to meet his eye."

The rest of the household thinks nothing much went on the night before, just a little accident, but Jane hasn't forgotten. She thinks it has something to do with the mysterious Grace Poole, but her inquiries in that line get her nowhere. Speculation about Grace's relationship with Rochester is equally productive, but it does provoke this leap of logic:

"Yet," suggested the secret voice which talks to us in our own hearts, "you are not beautiful either, and perhaps Mr. Rochester approves you: at any rate, you have often felt as if he did; and last night—remember his words; remember his look; remember his voice!"

Remember, indeed.

But after Jane has spent the whole day expecting to see Rochester anyminutenow, Mrs. Fairfax says that he's left. Off to join a nearby house party.

With Blanche Ingram.

From Mrs. Fairfax's description, it does seem that there's something special about the lady:

"Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester’s: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels. And then she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black and so becomingly arranged: a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw. She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends below her knee. She wore an amber-coloured flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls."

Aaaand we get another round of foreshadowing:

"Oh! yes. But you see there is a considerable difference in age: Mr. Rochester is nearly forty; she is but twenty-five."

"What of that? More unequal matches are made every day."

You think you know unequal, Mrs. Fairfax? You ain't seen nothin'.

But for now, Jane takes this description of the lovely Miss Ingram as a sign that no, she has no effect whatsoever on Rochester; that it's absurd to even consider such a thing; and that it's now necessary to abase herself further for having considered it.

But that doesn't mean the idea's gone away.