Re-discovering pleasure of reading

I have been home bound for some days. This temporarily changed my lifestyle and I re-discovered reading for pleasure. Being an achievement oriented person I typically read books not that much for fun but to get new skills, learn more. This has been fine but reading for pleasure of reading is great. In my earlier years I loved reading, it may have been some form of escape for me. Maybe reading is usually a form of escape from our everyday lives? It also stimulates our imagination, brings new observations, new wisdom.

As for ten years I was the only child and I was not allowed to play with kids in a communistic, industrial, small town yard, I was finding my friends in books.  I started to read early and my favourite were stories about boarding schools for girls. My mother must have bought them for me in a second hand book shop as my childhood years were communistic times in Poland. The literature of the times had to glorify the working class not boarding schools for girls from higher social classes.   

No wonder that reading recently Charlotte Bronte’s - Villette I re-discovered moods of my childhood and that gave me additional pleasure in reading the book.

          

Villette is about life in pennsionat – boarding school of Madam Beck. I was lucky to be able to buy a beautiful edition of all the novels of  the three Bronte sisters with great wood engravings by Peter Reddick. I am making my way though the set of the seven novels and Villette is my favourite so far. Boarding schools were a favourite location of the novels of Charlotte Bronte, so it is not surprising that I particularly like writing of this sister.

Charlotte Bronte

The story is about Lucy Snowe, an orphan who does not have any family and for a short while has to go through life with help of her godmother but soon she is left to her own devices.  She is a determined teenage girl when the story starts who has little money but enough to help her to get to Villette – Brussels where the main story takes place. The plot is not very convincing or realistic, but this does not matter much. There are compensations! The story is an excuse to write about subjects that must have been important and close to the heart of Charlotte, and perhaps the other sisters as well – working women in the XIXth century, their independence,  loneliness, spirituality and life styles of England and Europe. The currency of the issues discussed at length by Charlotte Bronte is amazing. She writes about issues that are still important, need attention and hopefully improvement. Or maybe they are just issues that are not resolvable and this is the reason why the book is so relevant also in the current times.

Some of my friends describe me as European. I am not sure if this is a plus or a minus but the fact is that some of my behaviours and reactions are not of an Anglo-Saxon nature. I call myself an Aussie with a strange accent but there must be a lot of European left in me that I am not aware of. Charlotte Bronte who for some time lived in Brussels was aware of the differences in behaviours of English and Belgian or generally European people.  The differences, in her experience, were not in plus for Europe. She sees Europeans as skimming, not trustworthy, fickle, flirty, generally without much substance. She noticed that there are exceptions, thanks God.

The subject of religion is a strong point of the novel. Bronte is a spiritual person but she  declares that “God is not with Rome”. I may agree with this statement but it is a subject for another post.