Skip to main content

Reading journal, entry no. 1, for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – full of potential spoilers so beware. May also contain bad grammar and egregious typing errors because I want to get back to the book and read more.

I‘m reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë and really feel I need to write something about it at this point. For those who have read it, I am at the point where Gilbert‘s narrative has ended and Helen‘s narrative has just started. I deliberately didn't read about the story before I started reading it and just about the only thing I knew about it before commencing is that it's probably a romance.

Such a storm of emotions already, falling occasionally over the verge into highly enjoyable melodrama: Gilbert falling violently in love with Helen (quite believably, I think, people being prone to fall for those they see as unavailable), H repelling him but eventually showing signs of loving him back (not quite as realistic as his feelings for her as it isn't explained why she would love him), and G assaulting the man he believes H is having an affair with, possibly in the belief that the victim has seduced her and is using her, or possibly because G is, when it comes down to it, a jealous boor with an anger-management problem. So far this looks like the beginning of a juicy big mis plot. Add to this that once G and H have a chance to clear everything up, they skirt the issue so adroitly that I'm sure this is going to be one whopper of a big mis.

I mean, really: what rational man attacks another over a suspicion and a slightly jeering comment? Ok, a lot of men probably would, but G has represented himself as quite sane, civilised and stable up to that point and then he suddenly lashes out? Not quite believable in my opinion, unless he has problems with anger management or a mental problem. However, this being melodrama and (I think) romance, he's probably just supposed to be violently jealous to the point of irrationality. Going back to check on his victim and actually worrying for his own safety should the victim press charges (or whatever they called it back in Victorian times) is, however, a nice touch and establishes him as a somewhat caring and realistic person, even if somewhat lacking in empathy for others as he makes little of the other man's injuries afterwards. This makes it practically certain that he is meant to be a sympathetic hero.

I can‘t really comment on Helen yet, as I have only seen her from Gilbert‘s perspective, but I am looking forward to seeing her from the inside. From G's perspective she seems like someone who has had a hard time prior to the beginning of the narrative and to be trying to make the best of things and avoid complications which, however, G and the maliciously gossiping neighbours are making it hard for her to do. She also clearly has a secret, and what little I have read of her narrative so far and between the lines in G's narrative, it seems connected to a man.

Is she an unwed mother, (that most dreadful and pitiable of creatures in those times), a widow with a bad marriage and bad debts behind her, or an abused wife or mistress on the run? Whatever it is, it must be connected with alcohol abuse, as she seems to have succeeded in purposely making her son quite disgusted by wine.

I just hope this doesn't turn into a horrid bleak read like sister Emily's famous novel. Come on, Anne, I need this to have a happy ending so I can use it as a springboard for rereading Wuthering Heights.

Gosh, I'd forgotten how much I used to love Victorian novels!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme