September Selection 2006
September Selection 2006
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting.
Books for September Meeting, 2006
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre is the kind of book that's great to read on rainy days. It's a romance novel with a hint of mystery and suspense. Set in England in the 1800s, Bronte brings a chill down your spine with the gloomy and melancholy background of Thornfield Hall. With such bewildering characters as Mr. Rochester and Grace Poole, she is able to add a cloud of fear and anticipation to the romantic aspirations of her readers.
This love story is intense. Although there are no intimate love scenes, the attraction between Jane and Mr. Rochester is evident. From the moment she meets him on the hill at sunset, the story develops into the most interesting love story ever written.
Jane is hard not to like, or to relate to, because she symbolizes the hope and desire for happiness in all of us. She is somewhat like a Cinderella, orphaned at a young age and left under the care of a jealous aunt, who raises her in a cold and unloving nature. However, unlike Cinderella, she does not end up going to the ball and marrying the prince. Instead she ventures out into the world, very much alone and penniless, to search for employment as a governess. She finds herself at Thornfield Hall, a place filled with dark secrets and a sad past. At first she is unsure of her situation, uncomfortable with the melancholy figure of her employer, Edward Rochester. Fortunately, she learns to love Thornfield Hall. This is when the story twists into captivating scenes. Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre slowly fall in love. One of the famous scenes is Jane playing the piano as Mr. Rochester watches her with a passionate stare.
There are conflicts however, as there should be in any good book, that pile up to a breathtaking climax. The ending will shock you as the mysteries are finally revealed. It is up to you to decide whether it is a happy ending or another tragedy. Nevertheless, Jane Eyre is truly a treasured classic and a page-turner that should not be missed.
http://teenink.com/: Juvy H., Dedham, MA
Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" however, has always eluded my understanding. I first read it in Bulgaria, in the summer of 1961, when my parents were making the final arrangements for our immigration to the United States. Jane Eyre is an impoverished orphan who accepts the position of governess in the household of the mysterious Mr. Rochester. Some rather spooky and sinister things are going on in the household underneath the pleasant appearances. Mr. Rochester himself is a glum individual. In spite of all sorts of highly suspect occurrences and his gloomy personality, Jane falls in love with him and accepts his marriage proposal. But just as they are to say their marriage vows, it is revealed that Mr. Rochester is married and that he keeps his wife locked up in the attic because she is insane.When I first read "Jane Eyre," I couldn't understand how she can fall in love with such a self-centered, rude and depressed man. I also couldn't understand why Jane accepted his explanation about his wife's insanity so readily, why didn't she wonder if he might have done something to drive her to madness.
Years later I would read "Jane Eyre" in English and learn about its importance. Both, Jane and Rochester were a novelty in English literature for the time period it was written. He is an antihero and she is neither beautiful nor charming but rather spunky, which today, we would call having an attitude. Also, for the first time in English literature, the protagonists were openly and intensely passionate.
The society in which Jane Eyre lived was very cruel to women. Rochester and Jane succeed in marrying when his wife dies conveniently. I would have understood better Jane's marriage to Rochester had she not had other options for survival. But, as it usually happens in novels of that period, Jane suddenly inherits a great deal of money providing her with independence and leverage. I felt that Jane's desire to serve her "master" (she frequently calls Rochester that) masqueraded as love for him.
Years later I would also discover that I was not alone in questioning Rochester's role in his wife's insanity. In "Wide Sargasso Sea," a prequel to "Jane Eyre," Jean Rhys conjures up what might have happened between Rochester and his Creole wife and how he might have driven her to madness. Rochester's first wife is a victim of a world ruled by men, a society in which women are men's subjects. In that arranged marriage, her inheritance goes to Rochester for the privilege of securing as husband an English aristocrat.
At book's end Jane Eyre tells us that she and Rochester have had ten years of wedded bliss. But I can't help wondering if at some future point he would manage to drive her to madness too with his domineering, volatile and controlling nature?
Ophelia Georgiev Roop, Library Director, San Bernardino Public Library
Wide Sargasso Sea
In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."
The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre.Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."
Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since.
Amazon.com
Some useful book club links (external links: open in new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities