Eden's Outcasts - a companion book to Little Women

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, was every bit as good as I hoped and expected. Coming into the book, I knew enough about A. Bronson Alcott to know that I thought he was a selfish crackpot who endangered his family's health and well-being to pursue his experiments in communal living. However, I had no idea what an innocent, well-meaning selfish crackpot he was until I read this book. Like his daughter, Louisa, I ended up forgiving him because his heart was so clearly in the right place, even if his ideas and capabilities fell fall short of the mark.

The most fascinating fact about Louisa and Bronson that I learned from the book was how coincidental their lives and achievements were. Not only were they born on the same day of the same month, November 29, but their greatest literary milestones were passed in the same year (Little Women for LMA and Tablets for her father), and they died within two days of each other. While LMA's literary success and fame far outstripped her father's, their arcs were remarkably parallel.

I found the book a delight to read--well-written, well-annotated and researched, and just the right amount of quotation from letters, journals (both father and daughter were lifelong diarists), and other primary sources. While I enjoyed reading about Bronson's quixotic youth and early struggles to find his place in Transcendental society, I most enjoyed reading about LMA's growth and development as a writer.

Having finally read Little Women last year, I can honestly say that reading this bio of LMA and her father, who was such a strong force in her life, has greatly enriched LW for me. Just today when I was listening to an audio recording of P.D. James' book, Talking About Detective Fiction, she says that "most fiction is autobiographical and some autobiography partly fiction." With the possible exception of the Little House series, I can't think of a better example of what James is saying than LMA and Little Women, which is an unabashed fictionalized account of her life.

Other notable highlights of Eden's Outcasts include a fascinating look at the years leading up to the Civil War and the abolition movement (John Brown's widow and daughters visited the Alcotts after his death) and the part the whole family played in this monumental struggle, not to mention LMA's relationships to the Concord greats, Emerson and Thoreau (who were mentors and teachers) and Hawthorne, who was a somewhat cranky and reclusive neighbor. I am now eager to get to Concord to visit Orchard House, Hillside Chapel, and Sleepy Hollow cemetary.

Having recently finished The Pilgrim's Progress, which was such a primary influence in Bronson's life, and hence his daughter's, I feel like I've completed a mini-course on LMA. Reading Pilgrim's Progess helped me see how Bronson could justify his single-minded passion of pursuing his Eden, just as Christian in Pilgrim's Progress throws off his family responsibilities in order to journey to the Celestial City, leaving his wife and children to journey on their own, just as Bronson's wife and daughters do. I can't say I ever come to admire Bronson Alcott, but I certainly admire his daughter and what she was able to acheive.

I'm not sure I'm such a fan of LMA's writing that I want to tackle her other works, but I found Eden's Outcasts to be an essential companion book to Little Women, which I read because of its popularity over the past 144 years (as in, "what's all the fuss?"), and reading both have enabled me to appreciate and understand the contribution of Little Women to American literature.

Reading Meme - tag you're it!

Susan from You Can Never Have Too Many Books tagged me in a meme, and since I love to talk about books, I decided to play along.

Here are Susan's questions and my responses...

1. What is your favourite place in the world?

Colorado - I've lived here all my life, and much as I love to travel, I love my mountains, my own western wall that enchants and challenges and shapes my world.

2. Have you ever visited an author's home, and did the experience live up to your expectation?

I visited the Brontes home in Haworth in 2009 and thoroughly loved the experience, especially walking on the moors and through the cobblestoned streets of the town and through the graveyard. Although I'm not a huge Jack London fan (Call of the Wild is okay but not the best book ever), I did enjoy visiting the ruins of his Wolf House in California. I still haven't visited Chawton, but it's on the list!

3. Do you read biographies of authors you like, or do you prefer to let their words speak for them?

I love to read biographies, and bios of authors are the best of the best. I'm just finishing up Eden's Outcasts about Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott. It's fabulous. Other great bios I've read include Claire Harmon's bio of Austen, Margaret Forster's bio of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Peter Ackroyd's bio of Shakespeare, and Ron Powers's bio of Mark Twain.

4. Do you have a comfort food?

Tea and toast--I loved rustic bread toasted with peanut butter or just butter as a mid-morning snack during work days.

5. Do you have a favourite classical author?

Can't reduce it to just one--Austen, Shakespeare, Eliot, Gaskell are the authors I reread most often.

6. Do you prefer to watch the movie first, or read the book first?

Book first, always. There are some first rate adaptations I haven't yet seen because I haven't yet read the book. I can't even name a book that I've read after seeing the movie...although my son wants me to go with him to Hunger Games, so I guess that one will be one anyway.

7. Do you have enough bookshelves? (I know this question is a cheat, because really do any of us have enough bookshelves?)

Yes and no. More books than shelves, but no more room to add shelves, until the teenagers grow up and move out!

8. Is there an author that you are planning to read this year for the first time?

G.K. Chesterton - I'm currently reading P.D. James book, Talking About Detective Fiction, and now I'm curious to read his Father Brown stories. I only just read my first Barbara Pym, so she's another author new to me that I'm going to be delving into.

9. Do you have a favourite historical period, and why is it your favourite?

Right now, I love reading about the Victorian period--the pace of industrialization and the oddball spiritual\political\social\psuedo-scientific theories and resultant experiments fascinate me.

10. Name a book that you are anticipating reading that is being published this year.

Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, which I just read is slated to now come out in May 2012. Like everyone else who enjoyed this book, I started with a decided dislike for Thomas Cromwell, and Mantel won me over with her brilliant book.

11. Name two of your favourite novels that you have reread more than once.

Middlemarch by George Eliot, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, and any of the Austens, usually my favorite is the one I've most recently read, so that would be Sense and Sensibility.

These are the only rules:
1. Post the Rules - here they are!
2. Answer the eleven questions that were asked of you by the person who tagged you
3. Make up eleven new questions and tag eleven new people to do the meme!
4. Let them know you tagged them!

Here are my eleven questions, though I am going to open this up to everyone who wants to answer these questions and then post their own--feel free to provide a link to you answers in a comment. So, if you're reading this, tag...you're it!

1. Which is your favorite genre, and has that changed over time?

2. Do you create a reading list for the year and if so, how well do you stick to it?

3. Do you have a reading goal for the year, such as xxx books? Why or why not?

4. Who is your favorite living author?

5. What's your experience with reading challenges?

6. How do your organize your books on shelves--alphabetically (by author or title), by genre, by publication date, or some other method?

7. Do you read e-books or audio books?

8. How do you choose what to read next?

9. Do you read books in parallel or strictly serial?

10. Which books have had the biggest impact on your life?

11. Which characters have you felt are the most real or believeable?

Silas Marner and A Simple Twist of Fate

I read George Eliot's Silas Marner as my first classic of 2012 and as part of my mission to read all of Eliot in order. Silas Marner is quite a short book, with fairytale qualities--a lonely miser finds his way back to humanity and community when a little child adopts him--not very subtle symbolism (the gold of the child's hair is mistaken for the miser's gold on numerous occasions) and breathtakingly beautiful prose. Every time I read it, I enjoy it more. Eliot really mastered her craft with this work, and transcended to the artistic level.

That said, I've been eager to watch the highly acclaimed 1985 BBC version starring Ben Kingsley as Silas. It was utterly faithful to the novel, in plot, in tone, in dialogue (much of it I recognized from the novel), and in feeling. I absolutely loved it and was thrilled with Kingsley's performance. I also thought the Cass brothers (Godfrey the heir and Dunstan the ne'er do well) were perfectly cast, as was Nancy Lammeter, played by Jenny Agutter. It was a thoroughly enjoyable adaptation and one that I look forward to watching again.

When I posted about Silas Marner, Lisa from Lit And Life recommended A Simple Twist of Fate, a modern adaptation starring Steven Martin from 1994. So after I finished the BBC faithful adaptation, I watched A Simple Twist of Fate and am now a fan of it as well.

The modern movie is remarkably faithful to the original story, and Martin makes an understandable and sympathetic misanthropist who is redeemed by the love of the child. I absolutely loved the Dolly Winthrop character, this time named April and played superbly by Catherine O'Hara. Gabriel Byrne as the Godfrey Cass character, this time named John Newland, was excellent, and Laura Linney was Nancy, his gentle, practical wife.

The major difference in the modern version is that the discovery of the child's parentage is made much earlier in her life than in the original. In the original story, Eppie doesn't learn who her real father is until she is 18, at which point she is given the choice of whose daughter she wants to be and there the story ends. In the modern film version, the child (this time named Matilda) learns who her real father is when she is 12, and a custody battle ensues.

My only issue with the movie is some ambiguity about why the judge changes his mind about who to award custody to at the very end. I think that part could have been made clearer, and I had to read up on the film on Wikipedia to get it. Apart from that little hiccup, it's a wonderful modern retelling of a fabulous story created by one of literature's greatest artists, and whom I believed truly entered the canon with this work.

Frank Delaney's Ireland

I've encountered Frank Delaney a lot lately on various other book blogs, mostly due to his most recent books, and so when I saw his first novel, Ireland, at the library it practically jumped off the shelf at me. Ever since I visited Dublin in 2009 with my daughter and learned that my mother's family was originally from Cashel, I've been wanting to read more about Ireland. I frankly couldn't have picked a better way to start.

Ireland presents a series of framed stories--that is, the premise of the book is that we follow Rowan O'Mara as he grows from a boy of nine to a young man of about 23, and we hear the stories, myths, and legends of Ireland as he does, mostly from an old itinerant storyteller who captures his imagination and pulls him into learning the history of Ireland himself.

Here's how Ireland begins...

Beneath all the histories of Ireland, from the present day, through her long troubled relationship with England and back to the earliest times, there has always been another, less obvious reporter speaking - the oral tradition, Ireland's vernacular narrative, telling the country's tale to her people in stories handed down since God was a boy.

Listening to Delaney read his own work was wonderful--according to his website, he is not only a writer but a "broadcaster, BBC host and Booker Prize Judge," all of which give the recording a richness and depth that I'm not sure another reader could've quite managed.

Much as I enjoyed the framework of Rowan's personal journey, the stories of Ireland are what really captured my own imagination. Starting with Newgrange, which I visited when I was in Dublin, and prehistory, the stories span the high kings of Tara, medieval times (the story about the origins of the Book of Kells was particularly touching), and the centuries of trouble with the English (stories about the Penal Laws and the Easter Rebellion, for example). Overall, I think my favorite was about the man who could handle Handel--it started a bit slow and I was skeptical that it would work, but then I got swept into the friendship that evolved between a working man and the great composer and how they ended up enriching each other's lives--a story of friendship at its finest

Next up in my Irish-oriented reading is Edna O'Brien's Saints and Sinners, another audio version, and then I'm planning on diving into another of Delaney's, probably Tipperary.

However, I just discovered that Delaney has a new series of short stories called The Storytellers, that are designed for e-readers, and I can get a free copy of each story with my Prime subscription on Amazon. How can I resist, especially since the first in the series is titled The Druid?

Some Tame Gazelle

I finally read my first Barbara Pym novel. I like to start at the beginning with an author, and so I read her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle. She had been hyped pretty thoroughly to me by a variety of bookish friends, and so I was relieved to discover that I did enjoy the book and am eager to read another Pym.

I'm always a bit skeptical when an author is dubbed "the next Austen." And while I can see the comparison to Austen insofar as the ironic wit and English village life are concerned, I'm not sure the similarities run deeper than that. I find Austen novels are mythic at their heart and essentially fairytales in which the heroine manages to overcome seemingly unsurmountable obstacles to win her prince. They may be ground in prosaic settings (as opposed to the fantastic settings of Mysteries of Udolpho, for example) but they are still fairytales, and are all the more powerful because the characters seem so very real and ordinary.

Some Tame Gazelle, and I'm guessing the rest of Pym's novels, are not fairytales. The two women whose stories we learn, Belinda and Harriet, are middle-aged unmarried women (I refuse to use the term "spinster") and rather than overcoming unsurmountable obstacles to gain their earthly reward of a husband, meander along a journey that takes them to where they started, reasonably happy and comfortable and fulfilled in life as long as they have "some tame gazelle" to love.

The title comes from a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly that contains the line:
Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove: Something to love, oh, something to love!

In Harriet's case, she loves curates--she dotes on them. She invites them to dinner, bakes them pies and cakes, showers them with gifts, and when the invariably pale, attractive young men move on, she mourns each briefly and then adopts the next to come to the village. In Belinda's case, she loves the village archdeacon, a former beau who married elsewhere but who maintains a slightly more-than-friendly relationship with Belinda. Both women could easily do what Charlotte Lucas did, and catch the brass ring when it goes by, but both opt for a life spent in adoring their own particular tame gazelle.

I did enjoy the wonderful names that Pym gave her characters. Who can read about the Bede sisters without thinking of "the venerable Bede," or not think of John Donne when reading about the latest curate, Edgar Donne, or not nod at the reference to the poem Piers Plowman when encountering Edward Plowman in the story. This novel creaks with English literary references, which makes me happy.

I did have to resort to my iPad to regularly look up words and phrases that were unfamiliar to me. Much as a looked, however, I never did find a reasonable explanation of what "mallows" are; internet reference suggest salad greens, but I got the feeling what was being described was more like a squash. Any thoughts?

I laughed out loud in places, I smiled frequently at Pym's wonderful turn of phrase, I sighed contentedly at the end, and I plan on reading Excellent Women next.

This is just the type of scene I imagined throughout Some Tame Gazelle. In a way, I found Pym in Some Tame Gazelle much more reminscent of Gaskell in Cranford than Austen at all.

Classics Challenge: Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I'm only on page 82 (just finished chapter 6) of Little Dorrit, and I've only just met the title character of the book, and so I cannot go with the obvious selection for character analysis in this month's Classics Challenge prompt. Katherine of November's Autumn, host of the Classics Challenge, challenged participants in February to write a blog post about a character we find interesting.

At this stage in the novel, having but 8% of the novel read (by my Goodreads calculator), I'm going to have to go with Affery Flintwinch. She is introduced first in chapter 3 as a "cracked voice" coming "out of the dimness" to greet Arthur Clennam when he has returned home and is meeting with his mother for the first time in years. Affery is an old woman and an old servant of the family--she is described as a "tall hard-favored sinewy old woman, who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but who retreats in fear from her husband, a "little keen-eyed crab-like old man."

She tells Arthur that her husband and Mrs. Clennam decided she should marry him because it wouldn't be appropriate for the two to remain as the only servants to a bedridden woman if they weren't married. So she did--no courting, not much of a wedding, and a marriage of convenience to a man she fears. Poor Affery.

The next chapter recounts a scene in which she is sleeping, hears a noise and gets up to investigate, and sees her husband talking with someone in a stealthy way. When Mr. Flintwinch sees that his wife has seen him, he goes after her, choking her and telling her that what she saw was a dream. She is so afraid of him that she doesn't question his assessment of the situation.

I chose Affery because I anticipate her being a literary Fool--that is, a character who speaks the truth and provides a moral compass for the reader and other characters if they are wise enough to see and hear the wisdom in her ramblings. Miss Bates in Austen's Emma is such a Fool, and I'm wondering if Affery is another such character. Dickens used her to show the reader that Mr. Flintwinch is involved in some shady dealings and he will willingly resort to violence to quiet anyone whom he sees as a threat--but he does this in an oblique way. The narrator doesn't spell this out, but describes Affery's experience as a "dream."

According to my Penguin Classics Notes, Affery is an "old Puritan name, common in Kent. Variants include Aphra, Aphora, Afra, and Afferie. Dickens may have been alerted to the name by a tombstone in a churchyard at Folkestone, where he wrote the main part of Little Dorrit: 'To the Memory of Affery Jeffrey (a female)'."

Here's a photo of Affery from the BBC adaptation that I am very eager to see, as soon as I finish the book. I'm not sure that this woman could have "enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but she seems frightened enough, which is her main character trait at this point in the story.

The Pilgrim's Progress

It didn't occur to me to want to read John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress until last year when I finally read Little Women. The March sisters play-act Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and they attempt to shoulder the burdens life deals them with Christian as their model. Only whilst reading Little Women did I fully realize what an impact The Pilgrim's Progress has had on western literature.

Apart from The Bible, until the twentieth century it seems that this book was the most widely owned and repeatedly read books, particularly in America, which was originally settled by the Puritans whose influence on thought and culture is still felt today.

So, with an extra credit from Audible.com, I downloaded an audio version and last month listened to it. Once I got through the rather long convoluted introduction, I found it fairly easy to listen to and follow despite being originally published is 1678. At its heart it is an adventure story peopled by characters whose names give away their role in the story--for example, Christian travels for awhile with someone called Faithful, he fights Giant Despair, and is tempted by Mr. Worldy-Wiseman. Nothing subtle here!

So here's what struck me. Not long into the book, I got a strong feeling of deja vu. It took me until Christian was battling the monster Apollyon, but then the penny dropped and I realized that the tone, style, and especially allegorical/adventure narrative style sounded exactly like that of C.S. Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia. After I finished The Pilgrim's Progess, I did some Googling and discovered that Lewis's first published allegorical fiction was The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis's personal revision of John Bunyan's novel. I wasn't able to find any scholarly evidence (not that I honestly looked that hard) suggesting that Lewis knowingly modeled his Narnia books on The Pilgrim's Progress, but to me it's clear that he did.

The other surprise was that there was a second part to the story, in which Christian's wife, Christiana, and children, whom he left when he set forth on his pilgrimage, followed him. I couldn't help but remember the training I received early in my career on making presentations: tell the audience what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. It seems that Bunyan, as a preacher, employed this methodology in his fiction, as Christiana and the sons visit all the landmarks that Christian did and either battle with the same obstacles to salvation that they did or are told how valiantly he fought and overcame them. No one reading The Pilgrim's Progress has any chance of missing the point.

After finishing the book, I enjoyed reading the introduction to the Penguin Classics version that I got as a reference should I want to look something up in the future. I particularly liked this passage:

The achievement of Bunyan in The Pilgrim's Progess which gives the work its continuing vitality is the creation, not of allegory, but of myth.

Hearing it read did make me feel as if I was witness to the origin of a myth and not just reading an allegorical sermon. Christian's pilgrimage has transcended story in our culture and become myth.

I'm looking for a reproduction of this map of Christian's pilgrimage, which I think is actually a pretty interesting historical illustration.

Mailbox Monday

Apart from sharing my latest book haul with fellow readers, what I love about the Mailbox Monday meme is coming up with a suitable image. I love the one I used today--winter is still with us and reading connects us.

Mailbox Monday is is being hosted in January by Alyce at At Home With Books. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!

On to my own mailbox...

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger - I got this for one of my brothers for Xmas. I knew he would love it and I knew he would share it with me when he finished. He did both, and now it's on top of my TBR pile. Thanks, Mark.

From the Amazon book description:
"As the Shadow of the Millennium Descended Across England and Christendom, it seemed as if the world was about to end. Actually, it was Only the Beginning... Welcome to the Year 1000. This is what life was like. How clothes were fastened in a world without buttons; the rudiments of medieval brain surgery; the first millennium's Bill Gates; how dolphins forecasted weather; the recipe for a medieval form of Viagra; body parts a married woman had to forfeit if she committed adultery; the fundamental rules of warfare; how fried and crushed black snails could improve your health, and much more..."

I absolutely love books like this, and it seemed like a good follow on to Bill Bryson's At Home, which I read last year.

Lottery, by Patricia Wood - this is another Xmas gift that has come home to roost on my TBR pile. I got it for my sister-in-law, and she enjoyed it. It's a Forrest Gumpy kind of story about a low IQ person who wins the lottery and deals with the hordes of family/friends who descend upon him.

Wordsworth: A Life, by Juliet Barker - I love bios and bios of authors/poets are my "one weakness." I haven't yet read anything by Barker, but I've heard her bio of the Brontes is superb. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this after I am done with Louisa May Alcott and her crazy father (Eden's Outcasts).

Deluxe How Luxury Lost Its Luster, by Dana Thomas - the same brother to whom I gave The Year 1000 gave me this book for Xmas, probably with the same expectation that I would read it and then lend it to him.

Here's what the Amazon book description said:
"Once luxury was available only to the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty. It offered a history of tradition, superior quality, and a pampered buying experience. Today, however, luxury is simply a product packaged and sold by multibillion-dollar global corporations focused on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and, above all, profits. Award-winning journalist Dana Thomas digs deep into the dark side of the luxury industry to uncover all the secrets that Prada, Gucci, and Burberry don’t want us to know. Deluxe is an uncompromising look behind the glossy façade that will enthrall anyone interested in fashion, finance, or culture."

I'm intrigued and am sure I will like it.

Speaking of deluxe...

Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, by Kristen Iversen - as a born-and-bred Colorado girl, it's my duty to know more about Molly Brown, Denver's own larger-than-life resident and "the Titanic's most famous survivor." I finally visited her house in Denver last November, and became inspired to read her bio.

Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym - Maxene, a dear JASNA friend, keeps on telling me to read Barbara Pym. So I got Pym's first novel, Some Tame Gazelle (isn't that a wonderful title!) and aim to get launched on Pym this year.

Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House, by Stephanie Barron - I started reading Barron's Jane Austen mystery series back when they first came out (when there actually weren't many Austenesque novels out there!), and liked the first few but then got bogged down and never returned to them. I won this one on Austenprose and am eager to resume reading the series. Thanks, Laurel Ann, for the giveaway!

Undaunted Courage

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose was everything I had hoped it would be. Inspiring, enthralling, and enriching, I absolutely loved reading about the trip to the Pacific and back that Lewis and Clark made just over 200 years ago.

I only had two issues with the book. First, I felt a bit let down that every aspect of Meriwether Lewis's life was explored in detail, but scarcely any of William Clark's was. To be fair, the title does say that the book is about Lewis, Jefferson, and the West, but since I always think of Lewis & Clark as a duo, I assumed that they would be treated equally.

Second, I used to be an ardent Jeffersonian, but then I started reading bios of Hamilton, Washington, and Adams, and I felt that Ambrose was somewhat unscholarly in his obvious adoration of Jefferson and the corollary slighting of John Adams, my new favorite forefather. We all have our biases, but Ambrose's irked me somewhat.

Once I got over these two slight hurdles, I fell in love with the book, and had to get a copy of the coffee table companion book Lewis & Clark: Voyage of Discovery so I could study the maps and gaze at the photos of landmarks along the journey that still exist today, some even in much the same condition as when L&C first encountered them.

There is no doubt that Lewis's story is a fascinating one and ultimately tragic. Despite his manifold talents and skills as well as the personality that enabled him to lead an expedition safely across an unchartered continent, his personal demons of depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt and self-indulgence drove him to destroy himself and, for a long time, his reputation.

With Lewis, it's difficult not to be overwhelmed by his early and tragic suicide and so overlook the years he spent as Jefferson's companion, secretary, and protege as he prepared for the voyage of discovery that Jefferson shaped with only him in mind. Next to the expedition itself, I found it fascinating to read about how Lewis planned the journey--how he decided what to take, who to take, and when and where to embark. He read extensively in a number of different scientific fields so that he could knowledgeably report on what he and Clark discovered, and Jefferson arranged for him to be tutored by leading experts in many of the fields.

This was truly a wonderful book that gave me a better understanding into the politics and geographic realities and dreams of America shortly after its founding, and it provided a fascinating portrait of a great and tragic American whose influence has been unacknowledged until fairly recently.

Here's a lovely image of Lewis with his dog, Seaman, who made the journey with the Corps of Discovery.

Now, I want to read a bio of William Clark as well as watch the Ken Burns film on Lewis & Clark.

Classics Challenge: George Eliot's Silas Marner

Katherine at November's Autumn is hosting the Classics Challenge and is posting prompts the 4th of every month. This month she is focusing on classic authors. Turns out she and I both are reading George Eliot. Here's a link to Katherine's post on Eliot, aka Maryann Evans.

Now it's my turn.

My first classic of the year is Silas Marner, by George Eliot. I first read this in tenth grade and didn't really warm up to it. What's to warm up to from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl? The hero of the story is unattractive in form and spirit--he has protruding eyes, is elderly (well, mid-30's, but that's elderly to a teenager, just ask Marianne Dashwood!), miserly, naive, and easily duped. We also read Ethan Frome the same semester and I saw Silas Marner and Ethan Frome as twin losers. Needless to say, Silas Marner was got through and quickly shelved and mostly forgotten.

A few years ago, I picked up the audio version from the library and thoroughly enjoyed it. Most of the details I hadn't remembered, and I found the story of the rebirth of Marner's soul and humanity to be moving, beautiful, and enobling. It didn't hurt that I had discovered Middlemarch in college and counted it among my favorite books when I reread Silas Marner. My admiration for George Eliot predisposed me to give Silas Marner a second chance, and I'm so glad I did.

Now, I'm rereading it again, as part of my George Eliot project (i.e., to read her books in order whilst reading a bio of her life), and it's interesting to see where it fits in the evolution of George Eliot as a novelist. I must say that with Silas Marner, she did set out to tell the story of a most challenging protagonist--even at my more mature vantage point, I have to say that he's still a pretty unattractive person at the outset. I have to believe that Eliot consciously picked an unattractive person for this story--I think the reader has to look on Marner with a certain amount of contempt in order for his redemption at the hand of a child to mean so much and to reflect so well the "man in the mirror," which I think Eliot strives to do.

I've only read the first two chapters, but the backstory has been fully told and Silas is a miserly misanthrope whose life is about to be transformed by grace. I'm really looking forward to reading lit crit about this book as well as what Eliot was trying to do with the story. It's much shorter than the two novels that preceded it (i.e., Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss), and it's very tightly focused on one man, his soul and the child who saves him from himself rather than being about a family or a village or a way of life.