Classics Considered

By a confluence of circumstances, I find myself in the middle of three books whose authors would probably have a great deal to say to each other, though they lived either in different time periods or different places (Charlotte and Soren both died in the year 1855, 38 and 42 respectively).

Mrs Dalloway is, ostensibly, about a lady getting ready for a party, but the 3rd person perspective follows a number of different characters, including one suffering from shell shock and two others from a broken heart. Villette is a surprisingly modern novel about a young woman dealing with depression in a foreign country. And The Sickness unto Death opens with a lengthy (often impenetrable) analysis of despair, with some barely veiled reactions to Hegel.

While this busy month hasn’t been the ideal time for reading these kinds of books, it is always interesting when one’s reading choices come together thematically. I don’t think Woolf and Bronte are usually categorized as existentialists in the way that Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky are, but I see a lot of the same questions and struggles in these women’s works, with Mrs Dalloway holding undercurrents of “to be, or not to be” and Villette exploring the tension between who Lucy might be and what she hide behinds (Kierkegaard would have a great deal to say about this, I think).

It was my intention to finish all three books by Easter—this is unlikely. These are very slow and weighty reads. 😉