Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (above) is over six hundred pages long, but it’s a page-turner . . . you just can’t put it down. Thackery said that about it when he first read it in 1847 — my experience of it a couple of years ago was no different. Part melodrama, part Gothic thriller, part love story, Jane Eyre is, of all the truly great novels, the most shamelessly entertaining. Wild coincidences, lurid situations, spectacular violence are called upon unselfconsciously to interest and thrill the reader — but nothing in the book is more interesting or more thrilling than Jane herself, Jane’s fearless voice.

The fierceness of the female soul, the subtlety of the female heart, have rarely been so exposed in fiction, and almost never from the inside, as it were — Wuthering Heights by Charlotte’s sister Emily (below, as painted by her brother Branwell) being one other notable exception.

In Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights we eavesdrop on a woman’s
conversation with herself. We do the same, at times, with Tolstoy’s
Natasha and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra — but their creators listen for
what men want to know about them. Jane Eyre tells us what’s important
to her, what she wants us to know.

I suppose it’s not surprising that these two Bronte sisters, who grew up
with their two other siblings in a world of their own among the
desolate moors, a world of imagination and intellect unconstrained by
the conventions of the Victorian patriarchy, should have developed such
singular and courageous voices. (That’s Bramwell’s portrait of his
three sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte, above.)  And not surprising, either, that their eventual experience of the wider world, where such voices from women
were hardly approved, led to a savage indignation — and a desire to
express it.  (Below is a picture of the Bronte family cottage in Haworth by the edge of the moors.)

The love story in Jane Eyre, however fantastical its setting, is the most
penetrating examination of love from a woman’s perspective ever penned.
In Mr. Rochester, Charlotte imagined an ideal man — ideal not because
he was good, or handsome, or gallant . . . but because he looked at
Jane and knew her, recognized at once her power and individuality. And
these things did not frighten Mr. Rochester — they delighted him.

Byron, writing a bit before Charlotte’s time, said of some current flame, “I
would, to be beloved by that woman, build and burn another Troy.” But
Jane would reply, “Before you set to work on Troy, look at me — know
me.” What was Troy to her? What, for that matter, had it been to Helen?

Mr. Rochester talked to Jane. What is more astonishing, he listened to her. That’s what made him her Achilles, her Hector, her Odysseus.

The uncanny thing about the book is that, in between all the Victorian
reticence and circumlocution, Charlotte’s voice sometimes sounds as
clearly and directly as an intimate friend whispering in one’s ear at a
formal ball. The voice is as alive, as frank, as modern, as the voice
of any 21st-Century girl. Jane Eyre is our ever present sister, here
and now — and we have to hope that, like Mr. Rochester, we have the
wisdom and the humanity to listen to what she has to say, and to love
her for the courage it takes her to say it.

Shelby Foote's massive three-volume narrative history of the Civil War is one of the glories of American letters.



You can buy the paperback edition here:

The set is also available in hardback but recent printings are no longer bound in sewn signatures — for a definitive version,
it's worth tracking down one of the earlier hardback editions.




Foote
also recorded two sections of the work as audiobooks, and it's wonderful to
hear him read this great prose in his classic Mississippi storyteller's
drawl.  The Beleaguered City, covering the Vicksburg campaign, and The Stars In Their Courses, covering the Gettysburg campaign, are both out of print but can sometimes be found through online sellers.

The great historians of the 19th Century established
the practice of history as a science, one which had to be founded on a
massive, exhaustive research into primary sources.  The industry they
displayed in this pursuit, given the difficulties of travel and
communication in their time (not to mention the lack of photocopying
machines), is almost incredible.

But their devotion to documented facts did not divert
them from their duties as storytellers and moral guides.  They felt
perfectly free to interpolate fanciful speculations into their texts,
often in the guise of exposing them as such, and to share their
personal opinions about any subject that came under their eyes —
revealing nationalistic, religious and racial prejudices which later
generations of historians would shudder to confess.

And they always kept in mind their duty to literature
as well, their obligation to write in learned but entertaining prose
that could be comprehended with ease, as well as with pleasure, by any
educated person.

The general result is that these 19th-Century
historians are a hoot to read — and none is more of a hoot than
William H. Prescott, of Boston, whose History Of the Conquest Of
Mexico, from 1843, while still accepted, with reservations, as a
pioneering work of history, is almost universally admired as a work of art.

The voice of the writer is confidential but assured,
as he mocks his less rigorous peers, pronounces moral judgments on
whole civilizations, damns the scoundrels and praises the heroes who
people his epic, and parades his learning with circumspect but
unmistakable pride.  He allows himself to be known.

Modern historical practice finds this sort of personal
interjection deplorable, but it might be argued that it has its own
corrective built into it.  A frank confession of prejudice on the part
of a historian makes it easier to form our own judgment of his or her
conclusions than a pretense of absolute objectivity which we know is
quite beyond human achievement.

Be that as it may, William Prescott is good company,
and his great history of Cortes and the subjugation of the Aztecs fires
the imagination in such a way as to impress the results of its vast
erudition on the mind indelibly.  We can correct his bias by consulting
later, more “disinterested” historians of the events in question — but
they will never make us care about them the way Prescott does.

[Click on the image above for a bigger version]

[Miranda, the Tempest, by John William Waterhouse]

Of all the primal bonds, that between father and daughter has been perhaps the least examined by psychologists and by artists . . . with the notable exception of Shakespeare, himself the father of two daughters, one of them the twin of his only son Hamnet who died in childhood.

Father-daughter relationships figure prominently in 21 of Shakespeare’s surviving plays, and they are examined from almost every angle, most of them problematic. In the comedies the relationship is presented primarily through the eyes of the daughters, in the later magical romances primarily through the eyes of the fathers.

Diane Dreher’s Domination and Defiance, published in 1986, was the first book specifically devoted to the subject of fathers and daughters in Shakespeare, and it’s a fine, illuminating study. It’s central thesis is that Shakespeare’s view of father-daughter relationships was both wise, psychologically speaking, and startlingly progressive, socially and politically speaking. Traditional patriarchal domination of the daughter by the father is always seen as destructive in Shakespeare’s plays, harmful to the psyches of both father and daughter, and to the social order itself.

As with all insights into Shakespeare’s work, the book raises intriguing but always unanswerable questions about Shakespeare’s biography. What real-life family dramas informed the clashes between fathers and daughters in the plays of Shakespeare’s early and middle periods? What epiphanies led to the sublime, almost mystical and always deeply moving reconciliations between fathers and daughters in the late romances?

It’s impossible to believe that there were no such connections between the life and the work — it’s equally impossible not to be vexed that they can never be summoned up into the light, except by way of Prospero’s enchanted, phantasmagorical visions.

What this is is an excruciating, bitter, brilliant example of pulp noir
fiction from the Fifties. Even though it’s set in the Thirties it
reflects the same post-WWII disillusionment that the Beat writers mined
— but it’s much tougher and starker, much less romantic and
pretentious than any Beat fiction. It makes William S. Burroughs look
like the James Branch Cabell of despair.

Many of Goodis’s pulp novels have been made into movies — Truffaut’s “Shoot
the Piano Player” was adapted from Goodis’s “Down There” — but not
this one. It’s just too grim, I guess, and its eroticism too perverse.
But its jagged broken-glass style and unflinching gaze are also
exhilarating.

[The cover above is from the original edition, but it’s still in print between less lurid wraps.]