![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerYestereve I drove past a new apartment complex on the end of town. New to me, at least: it must have been there a while, because trumpet vines half-covered the sign: Blackbird P--
"Blackbird Pond!" I shrieked.
I read Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond at the impressionable age of eight, which was the perfect time. If I had read it a couple years later, I would have realized ten pages later - as soon as Kit leaps into the bay to save little Prudence Cruff's doll, and Nat the captain's son leaps in to save her (unnecessarily) and then gives her a good shouting - that the whole thing was ending in wedding bells, and then I would have flung the book across the room with shrieks of disgust and never finished it.
But as it was, I never saw it coming. They come together to help Hannah, titular "witch" of Blackbird Pond, and teach lonely young Prudence Cruff how to read, and along the way loll around on Hannah's rooftop and discuss life, the universe, and everything, and none of this struck my gormless eight-year-old self as even slightly suspicious.
Not even when Nat shows up at Kit's witchcraft trial with the evidence to save her (which Kit in a fit of pigheaded gallantry refused to reveal because she would have to let Prudence Cruff's cruel religious nut mother know that Prudence was visiting the Hannah-the-Quaker-witch), and Nat and Kit look at each other across the crowded courtroom "and suddenly it was as though he had thrown a line straight into her reaching hands. She could feel the pull of it, and over its taut span strength flowed into her, warm and sustaining" - not even then did it occur to me that Nat and Kit were totally, totally going to get together.
This is also the scene wherein Prudence’s father tells off her mother and, the narrative approvingly notes, “stepped into his rightful place” as unquestioned patriarch of his family. It’s a little surprising that the story takes so rosy a view, given its previous sympathy with Kit’s struggle for some breathing space in the airless atmosphere of her Uncle Matthew’s household, which he rules with a benevolent but nonetheless stifling hand.
All authors have their blind spots, I suppose, and at least this one doesn't infect Nat and Kit's relationship too much. They argue passionately with each other, but beneath their passionate differences of opinion, in the important things they're the same: they're possessed of the same fierce strength of character, the resolution to protect the weak and face down the wrong. And they don't just want to help the weak because it's abstractly right: they're motivated by genuine love of Prudence and Hannah.
A great romance can only happen between two excellent people, and Nat and Kit are definitely that. They formed the pattern on which I built my opinions of literary romances.
"Blackbird Pond!" I shrieked.
I read Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond at the impressionable age of eight, which was the perfect time. If I had read it a couple years later, I would have realized ten pages later - as soon as Kit leaps into the bay to save little Prudence Cruff's doll, and Nat the captain's son leaps in to save her (unnecessarily) and then gives her a good shouting - that the whole thing was ending in wedding bells, and then I would have flung the book across the room with shrieks of disgust and never finished it.
But as it was, I never saw it coming. They come together to help Hannah, titular "witch" of Blackbird Pond, and teach lonely young Prudence Cruff how to read, and along the way loll around on Hannah's rooftop and discuss life, the universe, and everything, and none of this struck my gormless eight-year-old self as even slightly suspicious.
Not even when Nat shows up at Kit's witchcraft trial with the evidence to save her (which Kit in a fit of pigheaded gallantry refused to reveal because she would have to let Prudence Cruff's cruel religious nut mother know that Prudence was visiting the Hannah-the-Quaker-witch), and Nat and Kit look at each other across the crowded courtroom "and suddenly it was as though he had thrown a line straight into her reaching hands. She could feel the pull of it, and over its taut span strength flowed into her, warm and sustaining" - not even then did it occur to me that Nat and Kit were totally, totally going to get together.
This is also the scene wherein Prudence’s father tells off her mother and, the narrative approvingly notes, “stepped into his rightful place” as unquestioned patriarch of his family. It’s a little surprising that the story takes so rosy a view, given its previous sympathy with Kit’s struggle for some breathing space in the airless atmosphere of her Uncle Matthew’s household, which he rules with a benevolent but nonetheless stifling hand.
All authors have their blind spots, I suppose, and at least this one doesn't infect Nat and Kit's relationship too much. They argue passionately with each other, but beneath their passionate differences of opinion, in the important things they're the same: they're possessed of the same fierce strength of character, the resolution to protect the weak and face down the wrong. And they don't just want to help the weak because it's abstractly right: they're motivated by genuine love of Prudence and Hannah.
A great romance can only happen between two excellent people, and Nat and Kit are definitely that. They formed the pattern on which I built my opinions of literary romances.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 10:01 pm (UTC)That's wonderful ♥
This is another that I read too young--whereas, I read and loved her The Bronze Bow, which most people would find hideously preachy, but I didn't. (I loved, in The Bronze Bow, the portrayal of the mentally ill sister--it was years ahead of its time).
I think I found myself stultified too much by the environment Kit found herself in, and I think I dreaded the developments that I saw coming, in terms of the townspeople and Hannah. I should go back and try it again.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 03:56 am (UTC)I don't know if it's a book that would reward a first reading as an adult, but there's enough stuff in it - history and character and atmosphere (God, yes, the stultifying atmosphere, as if Matthew sucks all the air out of a room) - to make it worth a try, at least.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 05:48 am (UTC)I had a horrible habit of digging my heels in and resisting all attempts to make me read or like stuff that other people had read and liked, which may partly explain it. The other part being that I didn't like to read anything scary, at all, or I had nightmares for a month, so the mere fact that it had "witch" in the title may have frightened me away.
Clearly, I must fix this gap in my literary history.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 03:07 pm (UTC)