Book and Movie Reports by Ed

It’s strange how often I have the experience of reading an “old” novel like this one, expecting it to be dry and boring, and find that it’s anything but. You’d think I’d learn, but no. There’s a reason these are called classics: people have been thinking they’re really good for a long time, and they’re still really good. This is the kind of book I would have gone out of my way to not read in high school, which is probably just as well. I wouldn’t have appreciated it then. One thing I noticed right off the bat is that this isn’t Jane Austen, which just goes to show that female British novelists of the early 1800s can be very different. Jane Austen is very funny and satirical. Emily Bronte is very serious. There are flashes of humor now and then, but she’s mining the human soul, and it’s dark work. This book was written in 1845, but describes fictional events that took place from the 1770s until 1801. I don’t know why she placed the events in the novel so far in the past. Mayb