It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Victorian-era woman who gets her hoe on will get her divine comeuppance. 19th century literature is like an 80s horror movie-you have sex, you die. It doesn’t matter if the woman is cheating on her husband, or straight-up raped by her boss-extramarital hanky-panky must be punished. I decide to combine my reviews of Madame Bovary and Tess of D’Urbervilles, rather than spending two reviews covering a lot of the same ground. *spoilers for some really old books* […]
Misery Porn at its worst.
The Chancellor and I went to my parents’ house for Christmas this year. To get great tickets, we flew out of our major city’s airport at 7 am. Which meant we had to be there at 5. And be up at 3:30 am. We’re not morning people. And here’s the kicker: it was my 31st birthday. So apparently, my addled brain thought it would be a GREAT idea to start Tess of the D’Urbervilles that morning. Because apparently, my self-hatred knows no bounds. I started […]
“I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding if I could be one without having a husband.”
I had no idea what this story was about when a friend dragged me to see the new adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan. Thank god she did because I looooooooooved it. To the point where I was almost afraid to read the book. What if it didn’t live up to the movie? FFtMC tells the story of Bathsheba Everdene, a headstrong woman who ends up inheriting and running a Weatherbury farm in Victorian era England. She is very young at […]
“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,”
Following the praise of the audio version of Far from the Madding Crowd read by Nathaniel Parker by Malin and bonnie this year I decided that I would attempt my first Thomas Hardy. While I had a pretty good foundation in literature at school there are definitely some classics, or classic authors, that have escaped my purview (looking at you Charles Dickens). I don’t remember if I’d heard good things or bad, but I was definitely a little wary of this undertaking. I should not […]