Monday 10 December 2012

I Finished Shirley!


"This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky, but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest; it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight arid mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower. It rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard. The nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago - a howling, rainy autumn evening too - when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery sat near a wood fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived; and they knew that the heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling, and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them; life and friendship yet blessed them; but Jessie lay cold, coffined, solitary - only the sod screening her from the storm."

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte written in 1848 / 49

I finished it! All 627 pages of it. I admit there are some nice passages in the book, however i found it a really hard slog - like trying to get up a featureless hill on your knees in the rain. Sorry.
This does mark the end of reading Bronte texts for the project though - that's all i've read more or less for a year - so i am in a dither as to what to read next...


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