A passionate storm is at work; it calls to my mind the two weeks last year I wrote A Question of Honor, and how I finished its last pages in the midst of such a storm. I'm beginning to learn the way of the weather here: storms come up and break more violently than in south Texas. Since I have always appreciated a great storm, this is an enjoyment to me.
I am reading "Mathilda" by Mary Shelley, having completed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and its writing, while not as eventful or enthralling as Bronte's, seems one long song to Romanticism, passion, and all its ideals. That the two were written in the same society at the same time amazes me; while their similarities are obvious, Shelley's is clearly devoid of the piousness that heavily characterizes Wildfell. In fact, I thought perhaps Anne Bronte's work might not be as popular as that of her sisters' because her clearly didactic tone is such a poison to modern scholars.
All I have learned of Bronte makes me want to learn more. She was apparently a strong and remarkable woman even limited to twenty-nine years.
My own writing has been halting and difficult lately; this doesn't surprise or even particularly upset me. I remember what it is like to be taken up with passions for my singular world to the exclusion of all else: when I am in the midst of it, I cannot imagine being any other way, and when I am bereft of that energy, I cannot imagine it ever returning to me. Faith and experience reassures me that it will come again if I am faithful to its cultivation. Unfortunately the older I become and the more complicated my life, the more difficult it is to shield that from the means that would extinguish it: the things necessary to adulthood, yet totally unnecessary to anyone.
I am reading "Mathilda" by Mary Shelley, having completed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and its writing, while not as eventful or enthralling as Bronte's, seems one long song to Romanticism, passion, and all its ideals. That the two were written in the same society at the same time amazes me; while their similarities are obvious, Shelley's is clearly devoid of the piousness that heavily characterizes Wildfell. In fact, I thought perhaps Anne Bronte's work might not be as popular as that of her sisters' because her clearly didactic tone is such a poison to modern scholars.
All I have learned of Bronte makes me want to learn more. She was apparently a strong and remarkable woman even limited to twenty-nine years.
My own writing has been halting and difficult lately; this doesn't surprise or even particularly upset me. I remember what it is like to be taken up with passions for my singular world to the exclusion of all else: when I am in the midst of it, I cannot imagine being any other way, and when I am bereft of that energy, I cannot imagine it ever returning to me. Faith and experience reassures me that it will come again if I am faithful to its cultivation. Unfortunately the older I become and the more complicated my life, the more difficult it is to shield that from the means that would extinguish it: the things necessary to adulthood, yet totally unnecessary to anyone.