Leave me alone, I'm reading!

Villette-lover JaneFan has just e-mailed us to let us know about this Washington Post book review on Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading - Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan.

Random House defines the book as:

Part memoir, part coming-of-age story, and part reflection on favorite and influential books, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading views the world through an open book. From her unpretentious girlhood in the working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, to her bemused years in an Ivy League Ph.D. program, from the whirl of falling in love and marrying (a fellow bookworm, of course), to the ordeal of adopting a baby overseas, Corrigan has always had a book at her side.

We read this life in reverse as Corrigan begins the book as a “professional reader” always conscious of the many people, like her own mother, who don’t “get” the power of reading, and we end up as a fly on the wall of this only child in Queens, transported to exciting yet threatening worlds beyond her small apartment, a block from the #7 subway.

Corrigan’s references range from Richard Wright to Philip Roth to Chekhov, but certain themes emerge. Corrigan subverts the classic “man conquers mountain or ocean or battlefield” genre by juxtaposing it with what she calls “female extreme adventure novels”–books such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, and Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue, which feature women quietly fighting for their lives.

Back to the newspaper article, Washington Post reviewer Brigitte Weeks highlights what both herself and Maureen Corrigan have in common:

Both she and I are outspoken fans of Charlotte Brontë's Villette , which Corrigan calls "Brontë's greatest novel." Jane Eyre has stolen the limelight of history, but Lucy Snowe is more complex and empathetic. Corrigan cites the truly agonizing scene in the novel where the heroine, Lucy, alone in Brussels, is overcome by crippling depression. She wanders about the city in the dark, "weak and shaking" with the "insufferable thought of being no more loved, no more owned." There is no more powerful portrait of utter loneliness in our literature, and Corrigan exactly captures its power when she says she can't reread it often because "it scares me too much."

The book certainly seems worth reading, and anyone who loves books will simply be able to relate to the title. And we'd like to join both reviewer and author in recommending one and all to grab Villette off the long shadow cast by Jane Eyre and get lost in its beautiful, original story. You won't be disappointed!

As the Washington Post reviewer concludes "anyone who loves Charlotte Brontë, Dorothy Sayers and the poems of Stevie Smith is for me "a kindred spirit" (as Little Women 's Jo March would say)."

Categories: Books, Jane_Eyre, Villette, Charlotte_Brontë

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