blighty, part 4.

[extemporally]

Back in Britain and safely bestowed! I am nearly all unpacked in my delightful room, which (aside from too little closet space) is the best possible room; I have all my photos and postcards up so it feels like home. One of my flatmates is arriving tomorrow and oddishly is due for a visit sometime this week. I miss California and all the hilarious ridic

Comments

[blindmouse]

Evil lesbians! Boy, Dickens really has a thing about intimacy between women, doesn't he?

... there are evil lesbians in this book?

I haven't read Dickens in years and years and I really ought, I suspect the experience would be very different now. Although hopefully I would still love him.

(That said, my strongest memory of this book is the incredibly creepy bit where the parents of the girl who doesn't marry him tell him about how they imagine that her dead sister, if she'd lived, would have grown up to marry him. Or the other incredibly creepy bit where she marries the abusive arsehole, and everybody around her takes comfort in the fact that, though he be an abusive arsehole, at least she will never admit it or give up on him.)

[extemporally]

Well sort of! The bit where Miss Wade extends her "sinister influence" over Tattycoram and they live together, coupled with the bit I quoted? I am jumping ALL OVER THAT.

(Oh, boy, yes, that bit. /o\ Arrrgh Dickens.)

You should read some new Dickens! He does tend to moralise a lot but when he doesn't, it gets so interesting.

[extemporally]

I have totally read Hard Times! Wait wait lesbian romance what where? I don't remember that! Maybe I haven't actually read it after all.

[extemporally]

Oh yeah, I think I remember that! Through the Dickensian 'everything sucks! woe to post-industrial revolution england!' haze, mind.