I'm a book group junkie -- a paperback floozy, if you will (and bless you for trying if you did), though down on his luck and not as pretty as the other, younger floozies. I belong to two, one in Bethesda, and one in D.C. And they're really my only connection to contemporary literature. Left to my own devices, I'd still be blissfully unaware of Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
See, for me the best novels have a bustle, a beau, a hand or two of whist, and a complicated plot involving a governess who's really the mother of the mill owner -- only she's had to disguise her identity lo these many years because of something to do with Methodists and a case of consumption.
Hence: this book group.
It's a planned book group, meaning that the novels have already been chosen -- and there's a method there, believe it or not. I thought it would be interesting to take a sampling of 19th century writers -- Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy -- and track their novels, starting with their first, moving on to a middle, and then reading their last novel. In this way, we'll not only get a chance to see how each writer develops as an artist, but how the time itself helped develop the author.
At least, I'm hoping that's what'll happen. Our first meeting will be Tuesday, January 16, at 7:15 p.m. at the Bethesda Library.
I don't have any credentials for this. I'm not a professor of any kind, or a frustrated English Lit major looking to prove a point about post-colonialism and sexual imagery in Victorian piano legs. I'm just a guy who likes Austen and Trollope and Dickens.
If you'd like more information, or if you want to be included in the periodic mailings list, send me an email: mbevel2002 at yahoo dot com.
Welcome to the blog-portion of Bethesda Library’s 19th century literature discussion group.
If this is your first time, you’ll find the dates and the list of books here.
If you want to learn more about the discussion group, you should start here
We meet at the Bethesda Library monthly from 7:15 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
Mansfield Park
Discussion: February 20, 2007
6 comments:
Cannot wait until Bustles & Beaux start to rustle. The last time I found fellow Trollope fans was in 1985, a lone programmer reading "Cousin Henry” in a computer lab. Now 2007 has been planned, what about 2008 and reading Gaskell, Dickens, the Brontes, and Trollope?
Seriously, I was inspired to google/wiki Trollope and found he was fond of his "The Three Clerks." In his on-line autobiography he wrote "The plot is not so good as that of the Macdermots; nor are there any characters in the book equal to those of Mrs. Proudie and the Warden; but the work has a more continued interest, and contains the first well-described love-scene that I ever wrote. The passage in which Kate Woodward, thinking that she will die, tries to take leave of the lad she loves, still brings tears to my eyes when I read it. I had not the heart to kill her. I never could do that. And I do not doubt but that they are living happily together to this day." Time for an interlibrary loan request!
Can You Forgive Her? is one of my favorite Trollope books, probably ever. I'm pretty sure I was the most irritating Metro patron ever, though; every five minutes it seemed like I was sighing and saying, "Oh, Alice."
Dickens, the Brontes, and Trollope are definitely in the planning stages; it will depend on how successful this first series is. I'd also like to do an American writers series, similar to this first one, with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and a fourth writer that I've yet to pick. (I'd like it to be a female writer, for parity.)
I hope you're able to make it in January. If you have a moment, send me an email so I can add you to the mailing list: mbevel2002 at yahoo dot com.
Willa Cather would do to round out your American series...but I offer for your consideration a sensational dozen international dames, and that would be pronounced dahms, not rhyming with names! Maybe it could be entitled
More Sinned Against Than Sinning?: Strong Women in 19th Century Literature?
The Marquise von O... (1808)
Emma (1816)
The Pioneers* (1825)
Jane Eyre (1847)
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847-1848)
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Madame Bovary (1856)
Middlemarch (1871)
Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Way We Live Now (1875)
Anna Karenina (1875-1877)
The Real Charlotte [An Irish and Protestant Brighton Rock] (1894)
*I haven't read this one of Cooper's though, time for an another interlibrary loan!
The thing is, I'm not overly fond of Willa Cather. I've read both A Lost Lady and My Antonia and both left me feeling...meh.
I love the title of your suggested course. Could we replace Jane Eyre with Villette, though? It's my favorite Bronte -- and probably in my Top 10 Favorite Books ever.
And from what I remember of the book, Becky Thatcher is definitely a "rhymes with name" kinda gal. Not that I don't love her; but she makes it difficult.
Nope! No way would I replace Jane Eyre with Lucy Snowe. These are HEADstrong women, capable of staring down men-of-God, not prone to visiting lofty nuns.
I think if you cast your eye over these difficult women, they are all willful, not wistful. When you read Thackeray titled Vanity Fair Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, it almost gives the impression he was using hero for both hero/heroine - as we do now with actor for actor/actress, poet for poet/poetess. No kid gloves for Sharp, or for us, from her creator.
Sorry about Wilella Sibert Cather being dull in print, no brassy dames in Death Comes for the Archbishop, but I was trying to be helpful. Producing a dozen novels from a gender-balanced red-white-and-blue quartet of 19th century authors might be a long labor…or in the case of James, labour. A dozen great novels from a variety of American Victorian authors might be easier and you could put in Little Women (1868).
Better still, stay with what you find sensational and assign Alcott writing as A. M. Barnard. I have never read her A Long Fatal Love Chase or Pauline's Passion and Punishment, let alone Augusta Jane Evans’s banned during the Civil War Macaria (1864) or her novel that gave its name to a street in Bethesda, St. Elmo (1866). Then we can say my book club made me read it.
Remember book club etiquette is the same as party fun propriety. If you had a literary theme when you arrived, leave with the same motif. There is nothing tackier than dumping your thesis in favor of some more popular abstract concept at the discussion group.
I think you're wildly under-reading Villette. Jane Eyre is only kick-assy in the first section, before she goes off to be a governess and get married.
Lucy Snowe doesn't need no man.
And "wistful" is the last word I would use to describe Lucy Snowe. Brittle. Scarred. Self-denying. But not "wistful." Heck, she wishes for the carriage-crushing death of little what's-her-name at the beginning of the novel.
And agreed entirely with your assessment of Becky Sharp (Not "Thatcher" -- stupid, stupid Mike). I think one of the biggest disservices the recent movie version did to Becky was take away her claws.
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