Impromptu Trips on Country Roads

We were supposed to work yesterday, but when my lovely spouse hit a roadblock, we found that we were in desperate need of a book. No time to order it. No time for a more extensive search. It was a simple ‘who has it in stock?’ quest that took us on a long drive through country roads to distant malls. It’s on these drives that I most appreciate the springtime. When I’m not sitting in my house wondering what will happen and what could go wrong and instead am watching the grass start to come up through the snow. The sunsets get longer and I watch them coming through the windshield and feel like this is life; my worries aren’t.

Finding Books in Strange Ways

I had read Elizabeth Hardwick before, but I came to her collection of essays on female writers, female characters in plays, and female representation in literature via another writer’s essay. Joan Didion mentions in one of her essays that she was in the process of writing the introduction to the NYRB edition of this book. Then, when I read these essays, it sent me looking for Jane Carlyle’s letters — which Hardwick writes about beautifully — so reading Seduction and Betrayal brought me to more books in turn.

Sometimes that’s the best part of reading — finding more things to read and more literature to explore.

A Bit of Lit Crit

Literary criticism is a bit off of the beaten path of what I normally review, but when I find a volume that really complements my reading and makes me think about what I’ve read and what it means in a larger body of literature, then I make an exception. In Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick analyses the work of the Brontës, to the women of Ibsen’s plays, to Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath. Hardwick brings insight into how women are written by themselves and by men, and how their words are also often misinterpreted. She compares the attention that female writers got compared to their male contemporaries. She talks about what Ibsen gets right and what he gets wrong.

There is a lot to chew on here, and I couldn’t put the book down for an entire afternoon. My favourite essays were ‘The Brontës’ and ‘Zelda’ — two pieces on writers that deserve more attention and more complete attempts at interpretation. The Brontës have gotten a bit lost in popular culture and Zelda Fitzgerald still languishes in Scottie Fitzgerald’s shadow.

Further Reading Required

The thing about literary criticism is that it does require some familiarity with the subject matter before you read it. I hadn’t read all of the Ibsen plays that Hardwick writes about, but I had read most of them. I also have read most of the Brontës, Sylvia Plath, and some Dorothy Wordsworth. So, while I didn’t have firsthand experience of every text that Hardwick writes about, I still got a lot out of the book and there were places for me to go for further reading. That’s the ideal place to be when you open a lit crit book, I find. You don’t have to have read every book that the writer uses, but a base knowledge is essential in order to get the most out of the analysis.

But Will I Pay for it Today?

The trip yesterday was amazing, but I think I can acknowledge that I threw a wrench in my own schedule today. We have a bit of work to catch up with, but I think it was worth it. The best part of freelance is being able to make your schedule, and it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to just decide to take off on a drive in the middle of the day. I miss that.