"Every journey starts with a single step" (Confucius)

Hey, sorry I haven't updated for a while. It's exam season at the moment and revision is one of my top priorities, so this blog has slipped down the to-do list. But it's my Literature exam tomorrow and I am taking some time to relax and reflect on my reading journey over the past six months. From Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to Tennyson, Keats, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Gaskell.....my reading list has been full!

From my literary adventures, I have selected the following quotes from authors and books which have made an impact on me and I just wanted to share them with you:

"One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!" (Middlemarch by George Eliot)

"I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine" (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte)

"Money is a needful and precious thing,—and, when well used, a noble thing,—but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self- respect and peace" (Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott)

"If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love's sake only" (Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

"Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts" (Charles Dickens)

Finally, this one rings a loud bell with me! "Do we not while away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?" (Silas Marner by George Eliot). Although the internet is way after Eliot's time, I "while away [my] moments of....fatigued waiting] by surfing the net, which has unfortunately bred an "incipient habit". I am sure many of us can recognise the truth in Eliot's statement!

Take care,

Bella. x

Victorian literature

I am immersed in the world of the nineteenth century at the moment and I have been studying the Victorian age in relation to poetry, prose and drama, especially Victorian poetry. Something that interests me greatly is contrasting poems written in the Victorian age with poems written in modern times (i.e. late twentieth – early twenty-first century). Much Victorian poetry was written not only for the enjoyment of an audience but also with a strong purpose in mind…. Here I am thinking of poems such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children (which is still an incredibly moving poem, it nearly brought tears to my eyes as I read it) in which she protests against child labour and also her Aurora Leigh, which is about the Victorian views of women in society and their status: “they [must] keep quiet by the fire/And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay’” (Aurora Leigh, Book 1).

It’s fascinating to see how much art and careful attention to detail was put into poems such as these and I think that we have lost this art to a certain extent. I find it much easier to analyse and enjoy a Victorian poem than I do a twenty-first century one, but perhaps that is because I am more interested in the past than in the present!

The poets that are my primary studies include Elizabeth Barrett Browning and also Tennyson. I am not a fan of all of Tennyson’s poems but I think he writes in such a beautiful way. Here is one of my most favourite Tennyson quotes and even though its subject is death, it has a certain kind of beauty around it:

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan” (Tithonus).

Isabella. x

Hello

I am a student of English literature and this blog is a place for me to think, pontificate and write about my thoughts and impressions of the books I am studying, with perhaps the odd textbook, film, music and theatre review as well.

It is not intended to be a homework help for other students (do your own research!) but merely as a place where I can ramble about literature and perhaps come to some interesting conclusions.

Please send any comments/feedback to aliterarystudent@gmail.com

Thanks,

Isabella. x