Persuasion / 2

     "It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved."
     Captain Harville smiled, as much as to say, "Do you claim that for your sex?" and she answered the question, smiling also, "Yes. We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us."

Jane Austen, Persuasion

It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved to forget her truly beloved man. Because we cannot. Unlike men who have businesses in the city or hunt in the country, women are so restricted to the walls of the house that they can only remember. What is there to busy or entertain them but their own art of memory? 

Persuasion

...We shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you--all stories, prose and verse. ... I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But, perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

As I was reading this past midnight, I thought, Finally--Austen does it here! I can only imagine how confined women like Anne Elliot must have been in Victorian England, in almost anywhere else at that time.We have been constantly persuaded by men, yes, but also by other women, that we are inferior, we do not stand alongside our husbands and brothers and uncles but behind them. As her last book to write before her death, Austen sends out a final message to all those men and women who will be reading this, centuries later, on the persuasion we will have come to flout.

Character

Do you have any regrets?

What Margaret asked each of our characters. We all said yes. For what will you do without regrets? They make you better in the end. Almost.

A Farewell to Arms

"I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it."

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

This is the moment the reader whips out her pencil and scribbles a question mark. Oh? This striking imagery of Catherine seeing herself in the rain, dead and wet. There is something about the rain she is alluding to. It is persistent and unpredictable and dripping. Yes, but also  foreboding. To Frederic. 

In the end she will die, the reader predicts. She does. It is Frederic who walks in the rain afterwards, barely alive and hardly dry.