To use dangerous language, Jane Eyre is my girl. It's kind of odd, because objectively speaking, she is a success. She got out of a nasty upbringing to a position of conventional respectability, but her own desire for adventure pushes her in strange directions. Yes, she's pretty joyless. I see her as intense and driven. Her resistance to that jerk of a missionary who keeps demanding that she conform to his expectations is my favorite part. She *wants* to be what he expects her to be, but her innate self-respect will not allow her to. The domestication of Mr. Rochester is a bit artificial, but when I first read "Reader, I married him," I got a chill of joy at the sense of reserved triumph and delight in that declaration.

there is a time and a place for most books. Bridget Jones and the beach seem like a great match to me.

Honor was all, and I'm not sure that any audience of the time would put up with the Count suddenly going "My quest is wrong!" and still be able to have any respect for him.

No, I wouldn't want that. But I do think that, were I writing the story (and trying to keep honor in mind), I would have created a situation where say, Young Morrel is in grave danger, and the Count takes on that danger instead, and dies locked in a death-grip on Danglars, or something. You know -- so he accomplishes his revenge, but pays for it too.

I just, I got to the 3/4 mark of the book and was like, what did Villefort's in-laws do to deserve murder? The Count practically suborns their deaths, and certainly does nothing to stop them; and they weren't involved in hurting him AT ALL but they suffer for it anyway. The Count only pauses when Mlle. Villefort is in danger -- and then, only on behalf of Young Morrel -- and when the little boy is killed. He thinks nothing of allowing Danglars's daughter to be humiliated by being affianced to a wanted criminal.

Frankly, in pursuit of his revenge, the Count becomes ten times the monster any of his persecutors are; and the text failed to acknowledge that in a meaningful way. I think his death could have been that acknowledgement.

Hm. Now I have to think about Great Expectations.

I thought Heathcliff/Cathy was this amazing, romantic ideal when I was in high school.

In college, I thought it was fucked up and overblown and unhealthy as hell (the Heathcliff/Cathy saga).

t sits with Tep

I think Hardy's poetry is much better that the novels, and he did too. There are a few books that I'll admit to not being able to really analyze critically because they were so depressing that I just wanted to make the sign of the cross and yell "Out, out, damned spirit." That list includes Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure. Hardy's nearly unrelieved grim view of human nature is at odds with my own experience, and I can be very pessimistic.

There are people who just don't like Dickens, though

This was rough for me growing up. My mom is an absolute Dickens freak. (She actually wanted us to celebrate his birthday.) I tried so hard for her sake, but the only one that actually did capture me was Great Expectations. It's still hardly a favorite, but it does stick with me.

To add, I first read Jane Eyre a couple of years ago, around my 40th birthday.

msbelle, I thought Bridget Jones became throughly unlikable. Her self-obsession just became too much for me and the shallowness plus the flimsy plot made it not so much fun.

I loved My Antonia for the language and the landscape -- the sense of spaciousness, the world rolling out, the heroine capable of anything but for the constrictions of family and society (I think -- it's been a while). I was a NYer and an urban East Coaster and a snotty college kid, and I loved cities and dense hilly forests; I had no desire to go to the Midwest at all -- and My Antonia gave me an appreciation of a landscape I'd always vaguely thought of as flat, dull, and ugly.

I think it's got some beginning-novel flaws, even though it wasn't Cather's first, most notably some problems hooking up the mythic dimensions Antonia as a kind of new American/Old World legend with the smaller, psychological and social dimensions required by the plot -- but I do think it's magnificent.

Other Cather has been hit-or-miss for me. Can't stand The Professor's House or My Mortal Enemy, love the relatively obscure Lucy Gayheart.

My favorite Hardy novel is The Woodlanders, because it's wistful. But I haven't read much of him.

Nutty, I'm with you on the Count becoming much worse than the people who hurt him. He become a cardboard cut out of a person.