A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If you want an entertaining and fast-paced read about the life of Alexander the Great, I would 100% recommend Mary Renault’s The Nature of Alexander. If, however, you want a fair and balanced view of the man, well, listen, Alexander is Mary Renault’s best beloved blorbo (she is probably rising from her grave in wrath over this word choice, but if the shoe fits!), and all the chroniclers who say mean things about him are wrong and biased and probably using him as a vehicle to complain about later Roman tyrants without rousing the ire of the emperors. So THERE.

A fantastic read, but probably worth triangulating with a couple of other biographies if you want to have a clearer view of Alexander.

I also finished Daphne Du Maurier’s The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. The subtitle makes it sound like these stories were dug out of a box in someone’s attic, but in fact they were all previously published, most of them earlier in Du Maurier’s career, so not “lost” so much as “no longer readily available.” The quality is variable, but the good stories are excellent. I quite liked the title story (the first appearance of a hauntingly unavailable woman named Rebecca, although clearly quite a different Rebecca than the Rebecca of the novel) and the two stories about a streetwalker named Maizie.

And I read Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Glory of the Seas. I must confess I groaned when I saw that Hewes had won three Newbery Honors, as I found the first one (Spice and the Devil’s Cave) a real slog, but Glory of the Seas was quite readable even though our hero John did spend a lot of the book carrying the idiot ball. His intensely abolitionist uncle, who resigns the bench rather than enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, keeps sneaking out at night and having meetings at odd hours with his friend Garrison (publisher of The Liberator). Could he possibly be involved in the Underground Railroad!

Okay I realize that this is perhaps far more obvious to me, the reader of a work of historical fiction, than it would be for a person at the time to realize that his uncle the judge is in fact flagrantly breaking the law… but still I think John should at least perhaps suspect it a LITTLE.

(Having said this, I also spent most of the book convinced that John’s friend Benny Paradiso the merry brown-faced Italian boy was in fact a runaway slave pretending to be an Italian, and it turned out that no, he’s just exactly what he says he is. So clearly I can be misled by genre expectations just as well as John can be misled by expectations about behavior expected from his uncle the judge!)

What I’m Reading Now

In Jane Eyre, the awful truth has been revealed. Rochester already has a wife! In his attic! Because she is mad!!!! Rochester tries to convince Jane that Bertha doesn’t count as his wife, so if he and Jane lived together as husband and wife they would be married in SPIRIT. He also reveals to her that he has lived with at least three mistresses over the past decade or so and remembers them all now with horror. Jane, who wasn’t born yesterday, concludes that he would eventually look on her with horror as well, and heads out into the wide world with nothing but twenty shillings in her pocket, preferring to die on the moors rather than live to be loathed by her beloved.

I think that even if Jane did yield to Rochester’s entreaties to live as his mistress, it’s even money whether she or Rochester would grow tired of the arrangement first. I think Rochester would in time grow tired of a Jane who had lost her self-respect (as Jane would do, if she yielded from passion rather than genuine conviction of principle), but perhaps not as fast as Jane would tire of living without self-respect. Then off she’d go, just in the south of France rather than the moors of Yorkshire.

What I Plan to Read Next

Halloween reading! I’ve got a nice set of ghost stories this year. First on my list is Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Ghosts Go Haunting, and then I’m hoping for D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door.