Review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I went in fully prepared to find this book over-hyped. Since its release, I have seen its minimalist avian cover everywhere one could possibly encounter something literary, but never a review or a critique or a reflection that made me understand why its contents deserve such a prized place. (Contrast this with, say, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, which has been similarly plastered about and for which I regularly stumble upon interesting reflections about where she succeeds or fails in capturing Homer’s age-old story, or how it captured someone’s fancy.) Quite to my surprise, I loved it.

I can see immediately why this epistolary novel captured the literary crowd: it is a very literary book. In their correspondence with each other, the characters reference books and authors constantly. The main character, Sybil, and her best friend end their letters to each other with “What are you reading?” The books that characters select for each other or for themselves relate to the familiar reader something about their inner lives and preoccupations, and this intertextuality lends itself to a rich reading experience. For example, Sybil maintains a correspondence with Joan Didion. Having recently read The Year of Magical Thinking, I can imagine why she first reached out in the years following the death of her son.

But there is more to the book than just the satisfaction of “getting the references.” The central character is a complex but compelling woman with a strong sense of herself, but who has locked up her heart in the wake of her child’s death and as a defense mechanism as an early pioneering working woman in a male-dominated field. Her past is revealed to us slowly, satisfyingly. For example, her eloquent rage at the levity with which a newspaper covered a boy’s accidental death becomes more understandable once we learn of her own experiences. Her correspondence first introduces us into a number of disparate plotlines, which we slowly discover are really different versions of similar struggles: family separation and re-unification; forging familial relationships outside of one’s bloodline; and fitting into the world awkwardly, whether because of one’s gender, orientation, immigration status, or neurodivergence. The weaving together of these themes from many different angles produces an emotionally resonant work.

The author’s writing was beautiful, moving; I highlighted many passages. Here are a few:

I am finding I have nowhere to put all of [these thoughts]. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full.

I was afraid to have a girl because what if I couldn’t understand you? I’d never found a way to fit into the world, not really, and what if I didn’t know how to be a mother to you? I was afraid and that’s the whole thing. I was afraid all the time of losing something or ruining something, and then I did.

You and I have enjoyed an honest, confrontational friendship for going on sixty years.

Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.

My letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job, the letters amount to who I am.

Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

What to say about Roberto Bolaño's wild, wild, 1100-page journey of a novel? Did I find the plot gripping, its unending pages flying by? No. But did I find the characters emotionally resonant, such that aspects of the human experience were revealed or made clear to me? Also no. But did I delight in the prose, marveling at the ingenuity of the mind to have fashioned words together in such an evocative way? Once more, no.

But I did really enjoy this book for the unique way it developed its themes. The book is structured as five very different (almost) standalone novels. No single story makes a strong statement about a particular topic, but by touching on a given idea from a variety of angles, the theme comes into focus.

One such example is the idea of how easy it is to escape the horrors of the world and remain in one’s comfortable intellectual community. The first of the five volumes revolves around a tight-knit community of scholars who have devoted their lives to the study and translation of the novels by a mysterious German writer, Archimboldi. As these characters unravel their love triangles and academic tensions, we hear the briefest murmurings of some tragic story in a small town in Mexico. In a few scenes, there are moments of shocking racism and violence, but ultimately these conflicts barely matter. Questions of the heart and intellectual musings occupy the characters. In the second volume, we see more of the unrest and violence in Latin America, and we are introduced to a troubled, drifting woman, but through the eyes of a busy academic. Matters of violence and sexism and racism affect him insofar as they affect the people he loves. When it comes to broad issues affecting humanity, Professor Amalfatino’s more memorable reflections revolve around literature and intellectual culture. The third volume brings us closer still: through the eyes of a reporter, we learn about the startlingly frequent and brutal murders of women in the town of Santa Teresa. But Oscar Fate’s beat is African American affairs and his editor won’t allow him to expense an investigation into issues that affect Latinas. Three different explorations of how sites of knowledge production avoid systemic issues of violence and sexism. The fourth volume hits us over the head with the events in Santa Teresa, striking a format somewhere between a police blotter and a novel. The discovery of each woman’s body is described in detail, as is the largely fruitless investigation into their murder. The author shows us how poverty, misogyny, and American imperialism contribute to these deaths, and hinder their investigation. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character reflects.

Most of these mysteries go unsolved; the author seems to be cautioning us that mysteries in life do not typically have a climactic, satisfying conclusion. Despite Volume 4 resembling a police intrigue more than any other genre, we never find out who murdered all the women in Santa Teresa. Most likely it was many killers. Many killers, and broader socioeconomic problems. Volume 1 sets up the mystery of who Archimboldi really is, but ends without providing any answers — neither to the reader, nor to the scholars desperate to meet him. In Volume 5, the reader learns just about all there is to know about the life of Archimboldi. He is ultimately not a particularly interesting man (notwithstanding his quiet assassination of a bureaucratic Nazi). Nor is he a particularly compelling character, remaining always a little emotionally distant from the reader. Would the scholars that devoted their lives to dissecting his every written word find satisfaction in finally getting to meet him? 

It is a pessimistic novel. Or perhaps that diagnosis goes too far? The author shows us that real peace and happiness can be found in love. But the novel is broadly sorrowful about the state of society and we see few glints of hope for transcending it. Vulgarity and violence (particularly against women) — permeate the novel: the pummeling of the taxi driver in the first volume; the woman pushed into the ravine to her death by her own husband in the fifth volume; the spectator sport of fighting that drives the plot of the third volume; the systematic slaughter of Jews recounted by the unrepentant bureaucrat in Volume 5; and of course the litany of murders of the fourth volume. The refrain "she had been anally and vaginally raped" is repeated so often that I found myself anticipating the blow of hearing it every time another body is found. 

It is a very self-conscious and self-referential work. Bolaño’s characters discuss literature and art, and much of the commentary applies to the novel they appear in ("The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere."). Bolaño wrote this novel seeing his own death approaching on the horizon, and there are moments where he appears to reflect on his own place in the literary canon:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

What is that "something that terrifies us all" that Bolaño saw himself as struggling with, in this imperfect, torrential work? It’s a question the book rewards with many answers. Contemplating what these might be, long after you’ve put down the book, is what makes this novel enjoyable.

Review: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Safekeep explores political themes through a sapphic romance. However, it neither satisfyingly interrogates its political tensions nor weaves a compelling love story. The point of failure is the same for both aspects of the novel: the mutual understanding between the two main characters is just not believable.

The protagonist is a small-minded and reclusive Dutch woman, Isabel, who cares for her family home like a shrine: her parents are dead and her brothers have moved out, leaving her alone to tend the garden and obsess over the silverware. Early hints suggest to us that there is more to the house than Isabel would prefer us to know: her family moved into it during World War II fully furnished and touched with signs of its former inhabitants. We later learn that it was vacated because the Jewish family who lived there was sent to a concentration camp, then evicted for non-payment of the mortgage.

Isabel’s brother finds himself needing to travel internationally, and places his new girlfriend, Eva, in the “family home” while he is gone. Isabel treats her horribly, mocking her manners and her appearance and controlling her actions, while Eva remains peppy and full of life and keeps trying to break through Isabel’s hard exterior shell — a manic pixie dream girl, but queer. Because Isabel lacks any redeeming qualities, Eva’s patience and interest in her appears unmotivated. When they suddenly initiate a romantic relationship, it feels unearned, inscrutable, forced. Romantic chemistry springs from two hearts recognizing each other, whereas in this novel, hatred melts into love without that moment of genuine mutual discovery. The sensuously written passages of hazy, heady new love felt flat. What did each woman see in the other?

In the third act, the reader learns that Eva is the daughter of the dispossessed Jewish family, and the lone survivor of the camps in her family. She concocts a Hollywoodesque scheme of seducing Isabel’s brother to reclaim her home, or at the very least, reclaim some of her family’s dinnerware. Conveniently for the plot, the scheme is surprisingly successful, and Eva’s sojourn at her family’s former home is interrupted only by Isabel’s stumbling across her diary, where Eva had recorded the reclaimed dinnerware.

This reveal explains Eva’s patient persistence in befriending Isabel, but a mystery remains for the reader: what was this intense love actually founded on? We are told that Eva really did inexplicably love the abusive Isabel — it was not a mere ploy. Despite their relationship being founded on deception, we are told Isabel still loves Eva. The two women work out their pain in a series of emotional confrontations that explore the hurt of being kicked out of one’s home and not belonging anywhere. Isabel maneuvers to get the house put in her name — rather than her brother’s — and invites Eva to live with her. And so they live together happily ever after. The closing words of the book are in Hebrew: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

The novel is a study of dispossession. Published in 2024 and written by an author who spent her childhood in Israel and who has spoken about her opposition to the Israeli government, it is impossible to read this story without thinking of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Isabel’s fierce attachment to her house as her ancestral right despite the living dispossessed inhabitant’s desperate desire to return home renders her a symbolic stand-in for Israel. On the other hand, Eva’s suffering in the Holocaust and in the callousness and antisemitism of the Netherlands post-War is distinctly Jewish. The Israel-Palestine conflict is thus transfigured into one between Israel and Jews. The resolution of this political tension is shallow and Utopian: if the two sides simply fall in love they can share a home together.

But where does the mutual recognition for this unification come from? The answer is as unclear as the basis for Isabel and Eva’s love.

I could see an alternative restructuring of the story in which Eva’s motivations are revealed earlier on. Rather than reserving her intentions for a climactic reveal towards the end, her affections for Isabel could then be developed more transparently. Perhaps the romance could grow as they tend the garden together, connecting with each other as they connect with their shared land and construct something new. I would find it more believable from a character perspective, and perhaps from a political perspective, than an inexplicable attraction between two souls.

Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.

Review: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?

For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.

The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.

But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:

Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.

There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?

 At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)

The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”

This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.

Review: Authority by Andrea Long Chu

I picked this book up nearly by accident. I had been looking for Authority, Jeff VanderMeer's sci-fi novel, but the name Andrea Long Chu caught my eye. She was one of those writers to which I attach vaguely positive associations, although without a clear picture of their ideas or style. I decided to fill in these blanks (anthologies are great for getting a sense of a writer’s forest rather than just their trees) and I’m really glad I did. As a reader and writer with a background in the applied sciences rather than the humanities, I had been thinking about the respective roles of the novel and the critic in society. ALC addresses these two topics in the two new essays written for this collection (“Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority”) by historicizing the relationships between critic, art, and the public, giving me a better understanding of the tradition of literary criticism. These topics are also implicit in the 22 republished essays, which serve as examples of the theory she presents in these two newer essays.

Reading this book helped me test some of my own ideas about criticism, art and society. That is, I found a productive mix of inspiration and interesting ideas, as well as places where the author and I diverge, helping me to solidify my understanding. At times, she can be a little floaty, bending away just before landing a broader political point to strike more narrowly on a specific artist. She can also be turned inwards and towards pessimism; I enjoyed re-reading a critique of her On Liking Women that I’d read long ago, with my newfound familiarity in my pocket.

Below, I’ve included some highlights that I found thought-provoking.

• This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.
• That’s it: as close as Sittenfeld ever comes to laying bare her heroine’s deepest desires. In an airport memoir, this would be mere pablum; in a novel, it amounts to dereliction of duty.
• What I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all.
• It strikes me today as a vicious piece, but not a very cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.
• When Arnold had made a virtue of disinterestedness, he had pictured the critic turning away from himself and toward the social whole, whereas Wilde’s critic was so disinterested that he answered to no authority but his own personality.
• But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon.
• But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions—that is, ethical freedom—but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. 
• Indeed, it is precisely because we feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object to the way a writer treats them.
• The midcentury literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had stayed in her lane; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.
• The humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.
• This was the game’s masterstroke. Form erupts into content, the player’s ludic relationship to Joel at last given narrative flesh in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determination to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific loss of innocence from which—as players of The Last of Us Part II already know—she may never recover. Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding on to another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach.

Review: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House is a tightly plotted play about the limited agency and opportunities for fulfillment that women had during marriage. It must have been explosive, cathartic, to see performed when it first came out in 1879. But even reading it in 2023, I was pleasantly caught off-guard by the bold confrontation between vivacious Nora and her superficially doting husband. Building to the climax, I grimaced continuously at how he kept calling her his little bird, his little dove, his little squirrel, his flattery of her looks, his opinions on how embroidery was a much more attractive hobby than knitting, his pressing himself on her despite her protestations, his calling her childlike. “It was the nineteenth century, maybe it was normal” I told myself. To have Nora come to the recognition that his infantilizing, objectifying attitude was the problem in their marriage, that he cared not for her as a person but for her as a decoration in his home, oh it felt so satisfying.

Review: Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Well-mannered and bright woman from an impoverished aristocratic family undergoes character development and is rewarded for it by a prosperous marriage. Sound familiar? It’s the plot for novels ranging from Jane Austen to Jane Eyre, and it is, in my reading at least, completely, amusingly, subverted in Charlotte Brontë's 1853 novel Villette. Maybe other girls have marriage as their reward; Villette is about the aristocracy learning to become bourgeois, about a young woman learning how to run a business.

Our impoverished aristocratic heroine is one Lucy Snowe, a highborn girl who we first meet spending a few months with her rich godmother, Mrs Bretton. In her early adulthood, Lucy loses her family and her fortune. The circumstances of this sudden loss of wealth are never clearly explained. Lucy is an unreliable narrator; she keeps the identity of a character secret for several chapters, until it is most dramatic to reveal she had known all along (information asymmetry is after all highly exploitable for profit) and she often mocks the reader for making assumptions or wanting to know particular details or her innermost longings. All we know of Lucy’s impoverishment is that it somehow involves a shipwreck. Perhaps she could turn to her wealthy godmother for support? No: it is the early 1800s, the aristocracy faces financial precarity in a world upset by capitalism, subject to the whims of unpredictable market bubbles. Mrs Bretton's property, “which had been chiefly invested in some joint-stock undertaking, had melted, it was said, to a fraction of its original amount.”

With no family relations to support her, Lucy becomes a caregiver for a wealthy elderly woman. The woman soon dies, and Lucy falls into despair as she tries to identify how she will be able to support herself. Like many propertyless individuals of the nineteenth century who struggled to find employment, Lucy sets out to a foreign land: a fictional continental European country called Labassecour. Though in the same dire straits as the working class, Lucy retains the tastes and obliviousness as to the financial values of things of the aristocracy. A wiser Lucy, later in the novel, will remark upon awareness of the material worth of objects as a bourgeois characteristic: “Ginevra ever stuck to the substantial; I always thought there was a good trading element in her composition, much as she scorned the ‘bourgeoise.’” But for now, our hapless heroine spends far too much money — “three times that afternoon I had given crowns where I should have given shillings” — and loses every one of her paltry possessions on the journey, finding herself purely by Providence in the drawing room of a Madame Beck, a well-off mistress of a private school for girls.

In this tense scene, Lucy is faced with the “perils of darkness and the street” if she is not able to secure employment with Madame Beck. In desperation, she pleads, successfully:

Be assured, madame, that by instantly securing my services, your interests will be served and not injured: you will find me one who will wish to give, in her labour, a full equivalent for her wages.

Thrust into this new life, Lucy is very aware of class differences, nationality differences, and wealth differences. Madame Beck, dressed in impeccable French tailoring, “looked well, though a little bourgeoise; as bourgeoise, indeed, she was." The educational institution features girls from both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and Lucy finds that it is the lower class that possesses more admirable virtues:

At the desks of Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise sat side by side. Nor could you always by outward indications decide which was noble and which plebeian; except that, indeed, the latter had often franker and more courteous manners, while the former bore away the bell for a delicately-balanced combination of insolence and deceit. In the former there was often quick French blood mixed with the marsh-phlegm: I regret to say that the effect of this vivacious fluid chiefly appeared in the oilier glibness with which flattery and fiction ran from the tongue, and in a manner lighter and livelier, but quite heartless and insincere.

Lucy adjusts to her new life as a waged worker and as an immigrant — but not easily. She struggles with loneliness and depression. Eventually, she becomes so distraught that she swoons in a church yard, and is nursed to health by her godmother and her son, Dr. John Graham Brretton, after a surprise reunion. Lucy falls in love with Dr. John, however her affections are not returned. Dr. John is instead besotted with Lucy’s companion and student, Ginevra.

Let’s pause for a moment here and examine the trope of marriage as a reward for well-behaved young women. There are three single, aristocratic women in this novel (all British, incidentally): Ginevra, Paulina, and our heroine, Lucy. Ginevra, poor but gently born, is beautiful, unstudious, unreligious, materialistic and toys with men's affections. Paulina, a countess, is highly accomplished, sweet, chaste, witty, and thoughtful towards her loving if overly controlling father. Lucy falls somewhere in between the two: pious, gracious, restrained, poor at mathematics and lowbrow in her artistic tastes.

Following the conventional marriage tropes of the era, we would expect some embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in abject poverty or misery for Ginevra. Instead — having burned bridges with Dr. John for taking too much advantage of his heart and purse — we get an embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in Ginevra becoming a countess, living relatively comfortably, and (through a little of her own cunning) “suffering as little as any human being I have ever known.” For Paulina we would expect a happy, fruitful, and prosperous marriage. And it certainly is happy and fruitful — but her prize husband is Dr. John, who has little wealth and works for his living, and who is scorned repeatedly as “bourgeois”. Moreover, although Lucy expresses happiness that her friend marries the man they both love, there is also a sense of loss. Paulina drops suddenly out of the narrative, rarely to be seen again, and in her happy marriage, she seems to become fully subsumed within her husband:

Graham Bretton and Paulina de Bassompierre were married, and such an agent did Dr. Bretton prove. He did not with time degenerate; his faults decayed, his virtues ripened; he rose in intellectual refinement, he won in moral profit: all dregs filtered away, the clear wine settled bright and tranquil. Bright, too, was the destiny of his sweet wife. She kept her husband’s love, she aided in his progress—of his happiness she was the corner stone. 

And what of Lucy? Bottling up her emotions, she manages to get over Dr. John, and grows fond of Monsieur Paul, a teacher at Madame Beck’s school. M. Paul encourages Lucy in reading, arithmetic and various other self-improvement projects (going so far as to lock her in an attic so she would study her lines — is it a Charlotte Brontë novel without a woman locked in an attic?). When Lucy expresses an interest in running her own school — she wishes to be independent, not working for wages — M. Paul uses his wealth to make this dream come true. 

And here we discover the true reward: emancipation from poverty and familial control comes not through a fortunate marriage (which leaves one subsumed within one’s husband) but through financial independence via capital investment. M. Paul is immediately whisked away on business travel for three years. Lucy reacts thusly:

Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life. Do you scout the paradox? Listen. I commenced my school; I worked—I worked hard. I deemed myself the steward of his property, and determined, God willing, to render a good account. Pupils came—burghers at first—a higher class ere long.

Lucy finds happiness not through marriage, but from growing her business. After some time, yet another windfall of capital comes her way. A distant relative dies, and on his deathbed, bequeaths her a large sum, out of guilt for not having supported her more earlier:

How far his conscience had been sinned against, I never inquired. I asked no questions, but took the cash and made it useful.

Our heroine, who once spent crowns where she should have spent shillings on useless consumption like carriage rides, has learned the bourgeois art of making money with money.

The ending of the novel is ambiguous, but, mirrors the mysterious circumstances surrounding the loss of Lucy’s hereditary wealth: it is implied M. Paul dies in a shipwreck. While Lucy is presumably emotionally devastated by this loss, there is the suggestion that she otherwise continues to be successful in her enterprise. Although Lucy refuses to inform the reader as to her own welfare, the final line in the novel notes that the other independent school proprietress, Madame Beck, “prospered all the days of her life.”

Review: War and Peace by Tolstoy

My most controversial book opinion might be that I actually liked the second part of the epilogue of this book.

In War & Peace, Tolstoy lays out his criticism of historians, particularly those who subscribe to great man theory, or those who take halfhearted measures and try to play both sides. Tolstoy's philosophy here has clear roots in mid-19th century thinking, in which clashes between idealism and materialism were fierce, and discoveries like evolution signalled the death of intelligent creation (of man by god, of wars by genius generals).

In many passages, Tolstoy seems on the cusp of discovering or otherwise exploring historical materialism (first laid out a couple decades earlier by Engels and Marx, but not arriving in Russia until rather after War and Peace was written). However, he fails to see (or perhaps underestimates) the material conditions that differentiate the peasants and the nobility. He also, in his efforts at countering great man theory, downplays the importance of strategic thinking and seizing opportune moments. As a result, his view of history is one where the actions are a tidy mathematical sum of interchangeable men acting as they wish, the total of their personalities clattering like dice thrown on a gambling table. This then devolves into a rather uninteresting musing on the existence or illusion of free will.

Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first real novel, and having now read War and Peace, I understand this assertion. This first work of fiction is perhaps a quarter philosophy and history, and feels not quite evenly stitched together. The blueprints of ideas that become well-developed in Anna Karenina are visible in War and Peace. Between the two, I liked the former better, but this philosophical treatise woven with angsty young people trying to find their way in the world was still a fascinating read, particularly for understanding the development of thought in the nineteenth century, and in this period of time in Russia.

Review: Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelley

Some people believe you should judge and interpret the works of a writer in isolation, without consideration at all about the life, beliefs and times of the author. Helena Kelley, to her credit, is not one such person. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical is exhaustively researched, and presents a wealth of details about how Jane discussed her life and her opinions in her correspondence, what current events were shaping popular opinion at the time Austen was writing, and what literature Austen was likely reading and could expect her readers to have read. For this reason, I think the book is a worthwhile read for fans of Austen’s work, or people who teach Austen. 

But what of the thesis, that Austen was a secret radical? 

I share the author’s frustration with those who dismiss Austen as love stories. But I think it would take a fairly undiscerning reader to not interpret Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice as critiques at the very least of inheritance laws, the lack of financial independence allowed to women, and other oppressive social institutions aimed at women. The depiction of the (moral and financial) decay of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie is even more palpable in Persuasion. In Mansfield Park, there is an overt, critical, if brief reference to the slave trade that funds the lives of the main characters, and frequent discussion about the role of the church and the clergy in society. The satire in Emma and Northanger Abbey is aimed more towards manners and literature and the relationships between the wealthy and the less wealthy within the gentry, but both books are far from simple romances (indeed I’ve argued Emma is instead secretly a romance story about a girl named Jane).

However, the author’s assertion that Austen was secretly a far more radical than most readings of her rest either on innuendo and/or on some rather toothless definitions of radical:

We’ve seen [Austen] criticise primogeniture and suggest that change, voluntarily undertaken, may be the only safeguard against revolution.

and

[Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet] is, fundamentally, a radical. She knows her own mind; she reserves the right to decide questions for herself. There are plenty of kinds of authority that she doesn’t recognize, or tolerates only as far as it suits her.

This isn’t the same definition of radical that I use. However, let’s work on Kelley’s frame of reference, and take ‘radical’ to mean ‘critical of the status quo.’ 

Kelley argues that many of the sharpest, most progressive of Austen’s critiques are hidden in literature references, and that these were so dated by the time Austen’s early books were published (i.e., some 20-40 years after their being written) that they went entirely unnoticed by Austen’s contemporaries. Imagine making a Harry Potter reference or a Jaws reference in 2022; no one would get it. Other examples of hidden radicalism were naming the characters in Persuasion after members of the Stuart line of succession, supposedly a critique of the royal Georges that followed them. 

I found her argument that Mansfield Park met nothing but silence in literary circles to be more persuasive evidence of radical politics; this stony quiet could very well be related to the one impertinent question Fanny asks her uncle about his business in the slave trade. It could also be related to Fanny being a bit of a limp heroine in general. However, as Kelley notes in chapter 7, by Austen’s death and for the decades after, Mansfield Park was thought of as Austen’s second or third best novel (after Pride and Prejudice, and maybe Emma). Regardless, her argument about the transgressive narrative of Mansfield Park felt diluted and not bolstered by the tenuous lines she draws between the novel and radical contemporary poetry and by the exegesis on peach tree varietals.

What of the secrecy of it all? Why not be more overt? Kelley argues Austen wrote in direct allusion to Mary Wallencroft and her 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the anti-slavery poetry of William Cowper. These works (and many others) were published, popular, and more clearly radical than Austen’s works on the same topics. Austen was writing anonymously. Was her secret radical style from concern that her brother may not act as her publishing intermediary? Or did she simply enjoy being so cryptically critical that not even her contemporaries remarked on how radical she was?

Speaking, briefly, of radicals, Kelley dislikes Marxists. Since Marxists view class based on their relationship to production, Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, both of whom survive based on the rents of their [fathers’, husbands’] lands, are members of the same class. She views the Marxist lens of critiquing Austen (e.g., Raymond Williams) to be too blunt. To truly appreciate the secret, radical Austen, you need to use the British Aristocracy’s conception of class – the one that produces a near insurmountable difference between a Baron and a Baronet. Through this lens, Kelley is able to declare that a soldier and an unmarried woman with lawyer relatives making fun of a pompous Lady is “a revolutionary moment.”

The Marxist critique of Austen has a solid case in that Austen’s class critique is limited by the perspectives she chooses to center. As Williams writes, “where only one class is seen, no classes are seen.” Austen rarely, as Kelley concedes, shows members of the working class. Northanger Abbey has not a single named servant. The most prominent servant in Pride and Prejudice exists mostly to extol the physical and moral virtues of her master, Mr Darcy. However, I was swayed by Kelley’s argument that this changed throughout Austen’s life. She provided many compelling examples of three-dimensional and compassionately sketched servant characters in Emma (although they were all minor, uncentered characters).

For all this, I think Kelley’s close read of Austen does have value (if only she could have made her point about Persuasion being about the decline of the gentry (what a hot take) without seven pages about a fossil salesman), and changed my perspective of several books. I’m excited to reread some of them, particularly Emma. Here are some of her arguments I like the most:

1. Northanger Abbey: Jane was concerned about the lack of autonomy women had when it came to choosing when and how often to give birth. Pregnancy was particularly dangerous. The mysterious illness that took the life of Mrs Tilney could have been related to pregnancy, which would mean that in a sense, General Tilney would indeed have been (partially) responsible for the death of his wife, as Catherine fears. I also liked Kelley’s observation that the privacy of a married couple’s bedroom is a very strong western cultural practice (such that one feels trepidation at crossing the threshold of someone’s room), and that this novel alone of Austen’s featured an unusually high number of bedroom scenes. If I reread this book, I think I might skim Udolpho, the novel that so inspires Catherine, first.
2. Sense & Sensibility: Kelley points out that many sentences that seem to praise particular individuals instead equivocate. Edward “appeared to be amiable” and “gave every indication of an open and affectionate heart” (emphasis added). Kelley notes that we shouldn’t take either Edward nor Colonel Brandon – who mathematically could be the biological father of his adopted daughter – at their words. An additional stain against Brandon: even in Austen’s time, the mention of the British Navy’s exploits in India would have been seen as violent (by the radicals in society only, presumably…).
3. Pride & Prejudice: I usually forget that for so much of Austen’s life, England was at war. Kelley brings the violence and fear of soldiers and militias to the center. I liked also her description of 1890s fashion and how Ms Bingley was making fun not only of the mud on Elizabeth’s skirt but also of its dated style; her description of the contemporary meaning of the word “prejudice”: “tradition, ‘inbred sentiments’, unquestioned cultural assumptions”; and her historical content on the nuances of introductions. 
4. Mansfield Park: I now feel reasonably convinced that Fanny accepting her marriage to Edmund, as his second choice, was a bit of a selling out of her own morals. This, unfortunately, doesn’t make me like her more.
5. Emma: Kelley’s description of enclosures was fantastic background information – even for those with more of an interest in the economic trajectory of Britain in the 19th century than in Austen. Her highlighting of Austen’s portrayals of poverty (Romani people, parishioners, thieves) was also excellent.
6. Persuasion: perhaps because it was Austen’s most overtly political book, but Kelley finds nothing particular secret to point out here other than that people fall a lot, much like the gentry is tumbling down in power and wealth and social stature.
   

If you have bad politics, it comes through in your writing (see Ender’s Game, Anna Karenina). If you have good politics, it also shines through. I liked that view of Jane Austen – that of a perceptive and thoughtful critic of her times – much better than one of some smug women weaving her stories with obscure peach tree varieties and gothic novel references to make a point like a petty Dungeon Master with too much time on their hands.

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It's been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad I picked it up finally. It wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a sort of Woman Versus The Dystopian State tale, something along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World but with more women. And instead, it was a much more internal look at the how one responds to changing systems and to oppression - the lies we tell ourselves to survive and the lies we tell ourselves to forgive ourselves for perpetuating oppression.

The prose was beautiful; vivid. I think if there were more women in the metal scene, there would probably be a Handmaid's Tale concept album. A lot of very metal motifs: like contrasting flowers/life with rot, Offred's thoughtful reflections about her surroundings giving way to unbridled hatred about her situation, the ghost of the former Handmaid in Offred's room, mistrust, surveillance.....

The dynamic between the Commander and the Handmaid was well woven and reminiscent of much of the #MeToo kind of stories (despite Atwood's somewhat poor take on the movement). The commander trying to lead Offred into saying everything is better now than it was before; the way he exerted power over her to make her attend him and visit the brothel with him; the way he deludes himself into thinking she was there because she wanted to be....

I wasn't such a fan of the epilogue. The details of the world were not particularly interesting to me, and the issues Atwood takes aim at (AIDS, nuclear power plants) did not age all that well. The epilogue critiques how little we are able to empathize with the pain/humanity of people from centuries ago - but the tonal shift wasn't quite what I wanted to read at that point.

I read this during the Summer of 2020, Shelter In Place orders intact, the week after George Floyd's was murdered by the police, with curfews lasting days in cities across the country. I saw somewhere a criticism that the world reflected in The Handmaid's Tale is too unrealistic; society doesn't change so quickly. That criticism rings so hollow right now - it is very easy to see how society could change so significantly over the course of a few years. I hope it does - but in a very different direction.

Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein has been re-imagined and referenced so extensively in pop culture that I thought I knew all about it. Castle, bolts of lightning, a mad scientist yelling "it's alive!", protesting peasants armed with pitchforks and torches. Probably out of boredom with the tropes, I put off reading this book that otherwise thematically aligns very well with my interests - bioengineering, ethics, Regency Era literature by female authors. 

I was pleasantly surprised to instead find a very introspective and emotional story about two men, linked by a unique relationship. Rather than a climactic event marked by lightning occurring at some late part of the book, Frankenstein's wretch comes to being at the start of Chapter 5 during mundane meteorological conditions:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Frankenstein waxes poetic to himself for a paragraph or two about the sacrifices he made during his two years of study and his feeling of disgust and emptiness having finally achieved his goal (not unrelatable to a graduate student), then immediately goes to bed with nary a thought for the well-being of his creation. After one brief innocuous encounter during the night, Frankenstein tries his hardest to pretend he never created a man at all, and falls into a months-long illness so deep he can't even write a letter to his family in response to their imploring.

(Frankenstein suffers lengthy illnesses on two occasions, and I wondered at the author's reasoning. Was the dramatic and interminable depression supposed to signal how emotionally wrangled Frankenstein felt? Were such languid wallows in despair so commonplace among the aristocracy that the contemporary reader would not have remarked upon them at all as unusual? Was it merely a convenient device for explaining why Frankenstein did nothing at all for a long stretch of time while she needed the Wretch elsewhere?)

Frankenstein eventually recovers enough to read a very long letter from his adopted-sister-raised-to-be-his-wife, Elizabeth, which serves mostly to extol the kind nature and excellent nursing credentials of one Justine. Justine, nanny to Frankenstein's brother, is so perfect and virtuous that reader knows she will soon die. Surprisingly, it is the brother that shuffles off this mortal coil first.

In the long-awaited dramatic flash of lightning, Frankenstein encounters the Wretch on his way home and deduces it was he who murdered his brother. Regardless, Frankenstein continues his behavior of outwardly pretending he never created the Wretch—keeping quiet even as Justine is accused of and eventually executed for his brother's murder. Inwardly, of course, Frankenstein monologues extensively about the guilt, and how no one could possibly believe him and he had no way to save Justine.

A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me.

Frankenstein seems to think that deeply experiencing these feelings of guilt absolves him to some extent of the crime. I thought of Silicon Valley wringing their hands about about privacy, misinformation, addiction while continuing to change absolutely none of that. There is a lengthy scene where sister-slash-fiancée Elizabeth comforts Justine on the eve before her death, exhibiting her purity and virtuousness so extensively that the reader is sure that she too will soon die. 

To help process his feelings, Frankenstein goes on a solitary hike in the Alps, the lush descriptions of the beauty of nature serving as a foil against the horror of his creation. He encounters the Wretch, and reacts with an unreciprocated hate and fear:

“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh! That I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”

“I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

The Wretch tells his tale of how he spent the intervening months. He is introspective, and sensitive. Teaching himself first how to survive in the forest alone, scared of the reactions of villagers to his ungainly form, he next forms a sort of parasocial relationship with a family of cottagers. By watching them from afar, he learns of companionship and society, and recognizes that the sadness in himself is loneliness. His attempt to form a real relationship with them fails, and he is driven out. He by chance encounters a drowning woman and saves her life, only to be shot by her partner. Despairing of ever finding a home in society, the Wretch resolves to ask his creator for a mate—in a monologue that is uncomfortably reminiscent of incels.

I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create. (...)

I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? (...) I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. (...)

What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!

Frankenstein begins to make a female companion for the Wretch, but worries about the possible consequences of enabling procreation of a new race of Wretches.

[Y]et one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?

He decides to destroy all progress he has made on the female companion, and making good on his threat, the Wretch responds by murdering Frankenstein's best friend (also noted to have excellent nursing credentials), and Frankenstein's sister-slash-wife—on their honeymoon, no less.

Frankenstein realizes the only way to end the horror is to kill his creation, and he chases the Wretch across the Arctic. The two form a sort of odd adversarial intimacy in their chase, the Wretch leaving messages and food behind for his creator to consider and consume. At the brink of death from exhaustion, Frankenstein is picked up by the self-absorbed, self-important Captain Walton, whose letters to his sister form an epistolary framing device for the novel. Frankenstein dies onboard the ship, but not before first chiding the sailors in wanting to give up and go home rather than pursue their scientific dreams, and not before making it quite clear that he felt he had done no wrong in any way since the creation of the Wretch:

In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom; nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end.

The Wretch sneaks on board the ship to gaze upon Frankenstein's corpse, then with this closure achieved, disappears into the night.

“I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.” 

He sprang from the cabin-window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

What I loved most about the book was its comfort in straying from realism. No explanation of the science behind Frankenstein's creation was offered. The Wretch's experience learning about humanity and society was completely implausible from a practical standpoint. And this rejection of the need to explain minutiae allowed for much more interesting introspection and exploration of themes.

However—I feel the themes were a little murky, or perhaps they just didn't ring true for me. Frankenstein is an ambitious, confident, solitary genius who views himself as the sole person who can make ethical decisions about his product despite its societal ramifications, and who views others as being incapable of understanding his advances. This archetype feels familiar in 21st century Silicon Valley. But Shelley presents Frankenstein's fatal flaw as having played with creating life in a quest for knowledge, as opposed to refusing to seek help or advice from others. This is evident in Frankenstein's insistence on his deathbed that he "did right" in his decisions. It is a darker view of scientific progress than one I espouse; I think all areas of Science can be developed, provided we carefully assess and publicly debate the social ramifications. 

Which brings us to Frankenstein's second hamartia: his inability to recognize his Wretch as a human with emotional and social needs. Relative to the Promethean theme, this one hasn't seeped as much into the popular conception of Frankenstein. This theme, too, feels very relevant today; current debates on social ramifications of technology include the dehumanization of Amazon fulfillment center workers, the insistence that gig economy companies will finally become profitable as soon as we can automate away those pesky human gig workers, and the omission of human impacts (or indeed, playful delight in adverse impacts) when optimizing social media Key Performance Indicators. However, I felt that the way this theme was explored itself ironically neglected the humanity of the Wretch. The Wretch was abused and traumatized and socially isolated, and so he had no hope but to become a murderer and then kill himself? A depressing attitude towards survivors of difficult childhoods.

I could envision a satisfying script doctoring in which Frankenstein confides in Elizabeth, and although Frankenstein dies, refusing to ever acknowledge the Wretch's humanity and potential for redemption, Elizabeth reaches out to the Wretch and together with Frankenstein Sr. supports him in his introduction to society. This ending would also provide a very welcome opportunity for a female character to do anything other than display purity and virtuousness and then die.

I enjoyed the dramatic, elaborate prose. Although at times I felt that the author believed the word count used must be proportional to the emotional turmoil described, overall I had a lot of fun with the unironic melodrama. I would love to see a Frankenstein-themed black metal album.

Review: The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

I picked up this book because I thought it would be interesting to read some literature from a non-Anglo/Northern European author, and because the audiobook was available from my library. I was caught quite by surprise by the role the plague played in this book - what timing to read it during the coronavirus pandemic. It was a little uncanny to see concerns of social distancing/contagious disease play out, written from the 1980s and set in the 1600s yet read in 2020: people anxiously following social distancing norms, other people decrying the whole thing as a hoax, others frantically trying to trace down all data they could in hopes of understanding the disease, the strange love and resentment that builds from being cooped up so closely with another person, the fear of a second wave, the concerns about economic collapse if the markets are not re-opened...

The White Castle reminded me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in that it was chiefly about a relationship between two men, that ranges from a hierarchical relationship, to one of collaboration and productive research, to an antagonistic relationship. Jonathan Strange does go through his "candles in heads" phase of madness and The White Castle's Hoja goes through a similar "why am I who I am" search. However what I love so much about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the dry sense of humor, the strange fantasy world, and the absurdity of some parts. The White Castle lacked these elements. Further, there are ways I worry I am like Mr Norrell, ways I wish I was more like Jonathan Strange, and parts of Jonathan Strange I see in myself. Except for a drive to understand myself, and an appreciation for science, I didn't really identify with the narrator nor with Hoja. Because the story was so driven by character arcs and so little by plot, I think this diminished my enjoyment of the book.

The question of identity at the end of the book was interesting. I think I like the interpretation better that it was the Italian man that returned to Italy. The actions of the "narrator" work better if carried out by Hoja (and indeed also the actions of the sovereign, who seemed to take great joy in understanding two men as independent and very different people, also suggest as much). It doesn't make sense to me that the Italian man would seek company in a slave.

The pace was meditative, but not tediously slow. It was a relaxing read, if not gripping.

Review: My Brilliant Friend & the rest of the Neopolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

I almost gave up on the first book of the series about ten percent of the way in. It starts slow: character sketches of Neapolitans. This man was a fascist, was feared by the neighbourhood, and made his money on the black market. This woman loved a married man and went crazy when he left her. The stories were all so disconnected, and I didn't get the sense that I "got" the characters. The language was simple. The story-telling was straightforward and yet so incredibly detailed. Sometimes I wondered why they mattered at all. How could this exegesis on a single elementary school exam possibly be so important that the narrator dedicates this many pages to it? I continued reading only because I had the audiobook, and the meditative cadence suited my mood on a late-night run.

I'm so glad I finished the first book. I'd intended this review to be a review of only the first instalment, My Brilliant Friend, but I devoured the next three novels over just a few weeks, and when I tried to type up my thoughts, I realized it didn't make sense to review My Brilliant Friend as a standalone novel. The series is very much one single story - indeed the first and second book both end on the very same days their sequels start. 

In a way, I felt like this story makes many other tales about the inheritance of trauma obsolete. Through Elena Grecco's own experience as a novelist, we learn that if you haven't done the work to understand people, and the way their environment and their choices influence their lives, it's just exploitative or navel gazy or moralizing or posturing as worldly. Formative experiences can't be captured in a few flashback scenes - how people recover or respond to their hurt, and how they come to understand the ways they've been hurt, is often as impactful for how a character is shaped.

The story was a perfect character study of the two women. On the one hand I feel like I have never read a novel that so perfectly captures what it feels like to be me before. Elena's thought patterns, particularly her self criticizing, her admiration of her role models, and her introspection, were so like my own. It felt almost intrusive. I've felt the same complicated pull of wanting to leave home and explore the world, then, having left, wanting to return. I've also felt dazzled by a room full of smart people talking about enticing politics ideas. I've felt the same type of love for a friend - admiration, but also competition. I felt uncomfortably betrayed when Lenu began her affair with Nino; he was so obviously a jerk and not worth her affections, and I would never do this. At one point, Lenu asks herself if she was just another woman to him, and would be strung along (or something to that affect) and I, in my frustrating screamed exasperatedly "yes!!" - this elicited a surprised look from the person I passed on my run.

On the other hand, I feel like there's a paradoxical sort of lesson here: that it is impossible to adequately portray the fullness of a human being using words on a page. Lila is painted through Lenu's eyes, somehow so real, and yet also unknowable. 

I loved the political threads. The union-building plot at Lila's sausage factory was a stand out arc. I particularly loved that politics was woven throughout, a constant backdrop in conversations and decisions and relationships. It felt very real. I wondered a little what the author's persuasions are - socialist/communist I think, but she plays a little coy about how she envisions it fitting into the world outside of a disapproval of guerrilla violence and assassination, I think.

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

It's impressive that a book written fifty years ago (1969) still seems to have fresh ideas to examine about gender identity and gender dynamics. Gender and sexuality was a key theme of a lot of media I grew up on: Friends (1994-2004), Sex and the City (1998-2004), How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014). These shows are hard to watch now; it is cringe-inducing how many jokes in Friends have the punchline of "a man did something stereotypically feminine." Even in more recent media that discuss gender identity, such as Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), the conversation starts premised on the idea that the social construct of gender exists and will always exist.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, we explore a world where the very concept of gender is literally alien. In Gethen, the humans are ambisexual, sometimes taking the male role in reproduction and sometimes taking the female role. Genly Ai, the alien envoy to Gethen from the rest of the human race, is a man who grew up steeped in the sometimes toxic social constructs of gender dynamics, and isn't able to recognize the bias he brings to his ambassadorial attempts. The people of Gethen call him a 'pervert' because he is always fertile and always in a male form, but even this term doesn't have quite the same amount of negativity as it would in our world. They're suspicious of him from a political view, but overall quite accepting of his physical differences. The people of Gethen make social mistakes too — but they are in assuming that he has the same concept of honor and shame as their own.

I loved this exploration of a gender-free society, and the implications this has for social organization. If anything, I wish we saw a little more of it. Fewer political dinners, more Genly hanging out with the common folk, particularly with Gethenians in stereotypically womenly positions. I found the choice to use male pronouns for all the Gethenians to be a little odd; it isn't simply Genly imposing male identities, Estraven uses these too. (Although, I suppose, it is Genly translating Estraven's diary; perhaps there is a reasonable in-world explanation for this.)

Woven in with the commentary on gender, there are also meditations on nationalism and loyalty, and on "first contact" and how to approach it thoughtfully. For example, a single envoy is sent, which Genly realizes is not just because a single person is nonthreatening, but because if an envoy is sent with colleagues, there is always an "us" and a "them." When a person is sent alone, they must to some sense integrate into the social organization of the new world, and allow it to change them along the way.

I was lukewarm on the story itself until Estraven and Genly began their trek across the wild from the labour camp to Karhide. The story of the two people, both exiles and aliens in a sense, learning about each other and forming a friendship was beautifully told. Their intimate conversations in the tent about their experience of gender reminded me of similar conversations I've had with guy friends. I was a little heartbroken at Estraven's death. I was surprised that at the end Genly hadn't fully shed his own notions of gender norms. For example, he sees a young child that hes describes as looking feminine but remarks that no girl would be so untalkative. Perhaps the commentary here is that your social training is hard, if not impossible, to unlearn.

This is not to say the book aged perfectly. There was a line about how sex drive is necessary to be human (although it was the flawed Genly who posited this, I think). The use of male pronouns also seems a bit dated or odd. But overall, I thought it was an excellent read.

Review: Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

About halfway through the book, I realized I couldn't quite tell if Anne Brontë was writing Agnes Grey to be an unreliable narrator or a self-insert character - which is a rare predicament for a reader. Agnes (like Brontë) is the daughter of a poor church pastor, who upon turning eighteen years old, stubbornly and bravely decides to become a governess despite very little experience with children or education. She fails rather abysmally in her first job, but absolves herself of all responsibility since the parents refuse to allow her to discipline the children in any way. Her next position is largely the same; the children are inconsiderate and unruly, the parents are superficial. Agnes is unable to teach the children much of anything, but she is so passive, in an ever-suffering martyr sort of way, and so convinced in the correctness of her own rigid way of thinking, that this is hardly surprising.

For example, in the following passages, Agnes relates her first impressions of the Murrays.

Master Charles was his mother’s peculiar darling. He was little more than a year younger than John, but much smaller, paler, and less active and robust; a pettish, cowardly, capricious, selfish little fellow, only active in doing mischief, and only clever in inventing falsehoods: not simply to hide his faults, but, in mere malicious wantonness, to bring odium upon others. In fact, Master Charles was a very great nuisance to me: it was a trial of patience to live with him peaceably; to watch over him was worse; and to teach him, or pretend to teach him, was inconceivable. At ten years old, he could not read correctly the easiest line in the simplest book; and as, according to his mother’s principle, he was to be told every word, before he had time to hesitate or examine its orthography, and never even to be informed, as a stimulant to exertion, that other boys were more forward than he, it is not surprising that he made but little progress during the two years I had charge of his education.

(...)

If some of my pupils chose to walk [to church] and take me with them, it was well for me; for otherwise my position in the carriage was to be crushed into the corner farthest from the open window, and with my back to the horses: a position which invariably made me sick; and if I were not actually obliged to leave the church in the middle of the service, my devotions were disturbed with a feeling of languor and sickliness, and the tormenting fear of its becoming worse: and a depressing headache was generally my companion throughout the day, which would otherwise have been one of welcome rest, and holy, calm enjoyment.

“It’s very odd, Miss Grey, that the carriage should always make you sick: it never makes me,” remarked Miss Matilda,

“Nor me either,” said her sister; “but I dare say it would, if I sat where she does—such a nasty, horrid place, Miss Grey; I wonder how you can bear it!”

“I am obliged to bear it, since no choice is left me,”—I might have answered; but in tenderness for their feelings I only replied,—“Oh! it is but a short way, and if I am not sick in church, I don’t mind it.”

 (...)

But, with time and patience, matters began to be slightly ameliorated: slowly, it is true, and almost imperceptibly; but I got rid of my male pupils (that was no trifling advantage), and the girls, as I intimated before concerning one of them, became a little less insolent, and began to show some symptoms of esteem.

Passages like these had me nearly convinced that Agnes Grey was a genius character study about a naïve, judgemental, self-conscious young woman completely lacking in spine or introspection, who thought she was giving accurate and unbiased character studies of her pupils. However, for this to be the case, the story would have needed to become about Agnes, and her journey in how she perceives the world.

The novel instead was really about Rosalie Murray, a cruel coquette so cartoonishly evil that the author needed to lampshade the ridiculousness of the character:

Had I seen [her conduct] depicted in a novel, I should have thought it unnatural; had I heard it described by others, I should have deemed it a mistake or an exaggeration; but when I saw it with my own eyes, and suffered from it too, I could only conclude that excessive vanity, like drunkenness, hardens the heart, enslaves the faculties, and perverts the feelings; and that dogs are not the only creatures which, when gorged to the throat, will yet gloat over what they cannot devour, and grudge the smallest morsel to a starving brother.

The main plot tension arises from Rosalie attempting to make Agnes' crush fall in love with herself instead, her main source of recreation before she marries the wealthy but unpleasant Mr. Ashby. Despite Rosalie cruelly inventing work for Agnes to perform to keep her away from Mr. Weston and other forms of exploitation and emotional torture, Agnes strives to convince Rosalie not to rush into marriage and to instead consider marrying for love and mutual admiration of character. The plot essentially resolves with Rosalie being unhappy in her marriage and regretfully confiding to Agnes that she should have heeded Agnes' advice. Agnes marries Mr. Weston and undergoes no character growth, having never made any mistakes or admitted to any character flaws.

And this is why, having now finished the novel, I feel instead Agnes is a self-insert character -- a way for Brontë to put forth her opinion on the mistreatment of governesses, the moral depravity of the aristocracy, and the flaws of society more broadly. 

The book was not without a few well-put social critiques. For example, I liked this reflection on how we view beauty:

A little girl loves her bird—Why? Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless? A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes. If a woman is fair and amiable, she is praised for both qualities, but especially the former, by the bulk of mankind: if, on the other hand, she is disagreeable in person and character, her plainness is commonly inveighed against as her greatest crime, because, to common observers, it gives the greatest offence; while, if she is plain and good, provided she is a person of retired manners and secluded life, no one ever knows of her goodness, except her immediate connections. Others, on the contrary, are disposed to form unfavourable opinions of her mind, and disposition, if it be but to excuse themselves for their instinctive dislike of one so unfavoured by nature; and vice versâ with her whose angel form conceals a vicious heart, or sheds a false, deceitful charm over defects and foibles that would not be tolerated in another.

But I found it rather pales in comparison to Jane Austen's similar social critiques. Where Austen is just as pointed in her critiques of the aristocracy, I get the sense that she can love people while poking fun at their flaws. Austen's Emma is somewhat like Rosalie in viewing romance as a game, and marriage as a strategy. Although Austen describes Emma as "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," she crafts a layered, sympathetic but flawed character. In contrast, Brontë, or at the very least Agnes, appears to allow for two camps of people: the unlovable and irredeemable morally depraved, and the admirable and unchanging piously perfect. Perhaps more than any other Austen heroine, Agnes is like Mansfield Park's Fanny Price. But even Fanny earns her happy ending by standing up to authority, whereas Agnes stumbles upon her happy ending by passively yet piously floating through life, writing in her diary about how some people are just awful, and taking a well-timed walk on a beach.

Austen's dialogue is crafted beautifully with layers of subtext. Brontë doesn't seem to trust her readers to pick up on nuance and narrates character dynamics plainly:

After a short pause in the conversation, Mr. Weston made some remark addressed particularly to me, as referring to something we had been talking of before; but before I could answer, Miss Murray replied to the observation and enlarged upon it: he rejoined; and, from thence to the close of the interview, she engrossed him entirely to herself. 

The most interesting part about Agnes Grey is the central role than animals play - unusual, I think, for books of this time. Brontë discusses briefly the right animals have to being treated humanely, and characters are explored through the way they treat animals. For example, Tom Bloomsfield excitedly details his plan to roast birds alive. Agnes takes pity on these birds and kills them mercifully, but is chided for it by Mrs Bloomfield:

“I am sorry, Miss Grey, you should think it necessary to interfere with Master Bloomfield’s amusements; he was very much distressed about your destroying the birds.”

“When Master Bloomfield’s amusements consist in injuring sentient creatures,” I answered, “I think it my duty to interfere.”

“You seemed to have forgotten,” said she, calmly, “that the creatures were all created for our convenience.”

I thought that doctrine admitted some doubt, but merely replied—“If they were, we have no right to torment them for our amusement.”

“I think,” said she, “a child’s amusement is scarcely to be weighed against the welfare of a soulless brute.”

“But, for the child’s own sake, it ought not to be encouraged to have such amusements,” answered I, as meekly as I could, to make up for such unusual pertinacity. “‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’”

“Oh! of course; but that refers to our conduct towards each other.”

“‘The merciful man shows mercy to his beast,’” I ventured to add.

“I think you have not shown much mercy,” replied she, with a short, bitter laugh; “killing the poor birds by wholesale in that shocking manner, and putting the dear boy to such misery for a mere whim.”

Rosalie adopts a puppy, but neglects it when it turns out to be more work than expected. Mr Weston and Agnes are, of course, perfect dog owners and much beloved by their dog Snap.

Overall, however, I think Agnes Grey is moralizing and dated and not really worth reading in the twenty-first century.

Review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

 Rating: 3/5

There is almost a way to read Jane Eyre in which you interpret our heroine Jane as an unreliable narrator who refuses to recognize her relationship with Mr. Rochester is emotionally abusive. I say almost - I think simply rewriting the last two-thirds of the final chapter, the one that famously starts with "Reader, I married him," would get you most of the way there. Indeed, the chapter, in which Jane happily announces her marriage to her friends and they each react in turn, starts promising enough. House servant Mary could possibly be restraining herself from communicating her severe misgivings.

"Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning." The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me: the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of time John's knives also had rest from the polishing process: but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only —

"Have you, Miss? Well, for sure!"

A short time after she pursued — "I seed you go out with the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed;" and she basted away.

But it all quickly goes downhill from there. Mary's husband John reacts by "grinning from ear to ear" (one could argue that, having watched Mr. Rochester  grow up from a boy, John is unable to see Mr. Rochester as the abusive spouse he is). Cousins Diana and Mary "approved the step unreservedly." Even spurned lover St. John largely ignores the matter, saying only that he hopes Jane is "happy, and trusts [she is] not of those who live without God in the world, and only mind[s] earthly things." Adele doesn't have an opinion at all and speaks only of her own happiness - but that is Adele for you. 

Jane next extols the wholesomeness and intimacy of their love:

I hold myself supremely blest — blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character — perfect concord is the result.

Finally, Jane's patience and love of Mr Rochester is rewarded - an act the characters attribute to divine benevolence. Struck blind during the fire set by his abused first wife, after two years of marriage to Jane, he regains his vision. 

It is a wholly unsatisfying ending, because I find it impossible to read Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester as anything but creepy and unhealthy (even if setting aside the fact that he locked up his wife in the attic with no concern for her comfort or happiness and refers to her almost exclusively with terms like "monster" and "wild beast!").

Mr. Rochester, cognizant of Jane's attachment to him, dangles Ms Ingram in front of her. ("Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end.") When that fails to provoke sufficient response, he threatens to send her to Ireland.

[Rochester] “You’ll like Ireland, I think: they’re such warm-hearted people there, they say.”

[Eyre] “It is a long way off, sir.”

“No matter—a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.”

“Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier—”

“From what, Jane?”

“From England and from Thornfield: and—”

“Well?”

“From you, sir.”

I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of free will, my tears gushed out. I did not cry so as to be heard, however; I avoided sobbing. The thought of Mrs. O’Gall and Bitternutt Lodge struck cold to my heart; and colder the thought of all the brine and foam, destined, as it seemed, to rush between me and the master at whose side I now walked, and coldest the remembrance of the wider ocean—wealth, caste, custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved.

 When she asks for time off to visit her dying aunt, he becomes irritated and clingy.

“Promise me only to stay a week—”

“I had better not pass my word: I might be obliged to break it.”

“At all events you will come back: you will not be induced under any pretext to take up a permanent residence with her?”

He gaslights Jane repeatedly regarding her encounters with Grace Poole with his wife.

"The creature of an over-stimulated brain; that is certain. I must be careful of you, my treasure: nerves like yours were not made for rough handling."

His demonstrations of love show no understanding of who Jane is - her character, her dreams and her desires. For example, for their wedding, he wishes to drape her in jewels and finery:

"This morning I wrote to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in his keeping,—heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield. In a day or two I hope to pour them into your lap: for every privilege, every attention shall be yours that I would accord a peer’s daughter, if about to marry her.”

“Oh, sir!—never rain jewels! I don’t like to hear them spoken of.  Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not have them.”

“I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on your forehead,—which it will become: for nature, at least, has stamped her patent of nobility on this brow, Jane; and I will clasp the bracelets on these fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings.”

This makes Jane incredibly miserable, which he seems not to recognize at all.

Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jeweller’s shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we re-entered the carriage, and I sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what, in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten—the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee. “It would, indeed, be a relief,” I thought, “if I had ever so small an independency; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me."

When she protests these displays of wealth, Mr. Rochester's reaction is to laugh at her patronizingly.

He chuckled; he rubbed his hands. “Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!” he exclaimed. “Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!”

This is the height of their romance! The honeymoon before she discovers he is already married! At the wedding altar, he reacts this way in response to the accusations that he is not legally able to marry Jane:

Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to recognise in me a human being, he only twined my waist with his arm and riveted me to his side. 

This abusive nature seems to be highlighted specifically by Bronte in the carriage scene where Adele joins Jane and Mr. Rochester on a shopping trip. Mr Rochester muses that he shall whisk Jane away and live with her alone on the moon. Adele reacts with horror and confusion, eventually concluding “She is far better as she is. Besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon. If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you.”

 Perhaps all this could be somewhat mitigated, given the right redemption scene. Instead, Jane hears of his injuries, and of his wife being dead, and rushes to him at once, eagerly agreeing to marry him. It is only after this point that Mr. Rochester acknowledges his failings in his treatment of her and understanding of her sense of morality. ("I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower—breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent snatched it from me.") His physical injury alone appears to be enough justice.

 And this is frustrating to me because I love Jane so dearly. She is fiercely independent, smart, introspective, and brave in following her convictions. Her narration is dramatic and vivid. She sees the world so imaginatively, often finding both beauty and destruction or power and peace within the same sight. I love these contrasts!

I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our garden: this pleasure consisted in prospect of noble summits girdling a great hill-hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. How different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow!—when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down ing and holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck! That beck itself was then a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeletons.

Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream? Assuredly, pleasant enough: but whether healthy or not is another question.

That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.

Were it not for this unfortunate relationship I would read this book over and over again!

So, how would I remedy the ending? The most parsimonious approach would be as I suggested earlier. Re-write just the last part of the final chapter, in which Jane reacts defensively that all her friends were horrified at her elopement, deluding herself, and coming up with excuses about how no one understands their love. The challenge would be to make it obvious enough that the reader is clear the author believes the romance to be a twisted evil thing, while still remaining faithful to Jane's character voice. A particularly modern flair would be to end the novel with a sort of Handmaiden's Tale-style epilogue, describing how this account is entered into evidence as to why Mr. Rochester should not be able to take some poor hapless lass as his third wife. I can't imagine a happy ending for Jane without script-doctoring in at least another five or six chapters. And then it becomes really quite another tale.

So where does that leave me? Frustrated, heartbroken, unsatisfied. Oh Jane, I want so much better for you.