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Recently, during my family excavations, I unearthed a
homemade booklet, “Books Read in 1900,” belonging to my
grandmother. She’d have been 30. Inside the cardboard cover
she’s quoted, “Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a good
book.” She begins Jan. 1 with a virtuous book: Happiness: As Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought (1898) and remarks, “a book everyone should
read.” She calls Good Books as Life
Teachers “very grand.” However,
Winston Churchill’s Richard Carvel (1899; 578 pages) receives “A good story, have read
better.” Next comes a historical novel, The
Romance of Dollard, about the return of the
Iroquois to Quebec, and she’s only to Jan. 13. The next, Janice Meredith by Paul
Leicester Ford, a Revolutionary War story, rates this trenchant comment:
“A very good story well written but why were all the women of that
time so very pretty but equally weak?” My grandmother spends the next
10 days reading Charlotte Brontë’s Villette: “Do not like it very well.” A further choice,
“I do not know if I like it or not,” and then, “Have just
finished Jane Eyre again. Mr. Rochester is a man to admire, pity, love.”
Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: “It gives anyone a very good idea of the country
and life in the early days of California.”
Other books through February are judged as “a
cute story of school life,” “good indeed,” “a very
improbable story” (this was 1900’s bestseller To Have and To Hold, still on The New York Times Top 10 list
years later and then made into several movies; I read the complicated plot,
and it is improbable). The last entries are David Harum and When Knighthood Was in
Flower; then Grama quit recording. There
weren’t pages left to last her through the spring anyway.
I’m impressed with Grama’s reading. Most
are solid books, recently published, requiring thought. Several were turned
into movies and later refilmed. On the Internet I can find all but one
still in print; Forethought is called “a cultural heritage.”
Returning to Jane Eyre, I recommend rereading it and also reading Jasper
Fforde’s recent The Eyre Affair, a hilarious romp into Dickens and Brontë by a
literary detective, Thursday Next, who lives in an alternate world —
England in 1985 — where her Uncle Mycroft has invented a “prose
portal” that allows her to enter books in search of literary
villains. In Jane Eyre she accidentally improves the ending — it’s the
villain who sets fire to Thornfield and kills Bertha but Thursday, aided by
Mr. Rochester, who gets Jane to return from the loveless St. John. For good
measure, Thursday also frees her Aunt Polly, who’s been imprisoned in
a Wordsworth poem, and saves the Dickens oeuvre from a steady drain of
characters. This superclever story will leave you dizzy with all
the literary references you catch, and you’ll wonder which ones
you’re surely missing. You’ll find laughs on every page, and
you’ll hurry to the library for Thursday’s next adventure, Lost in a Good Book. Once
there, you might notice Fforde’s Nursery mystery series and check out the one where some dastard
shoots Humpty Dumpty through the albumen.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University of
Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2007.
