High Romance

I'm reading Jane Eyre again.

I have to admit, that can be a little dangerous. I have a thing about Charlotte Brontë's novels - particularly Villette and especially Jane Eyre.

I just seem to move into a different head space where nothing seems to be entirely real or applicable unless it has something to do with Gothic Romance.

What do I care of your petty, work-a-day questions when there are souls rent asunder by cruel circumstance?

Who can condone wasting time on statistics and what-not when there are those who feel such keen pain, having to watch the one they love pledge themselves to one inferior to them? Or, worse still, one perfectly suited and superior in every way?

Do you think my heart made of stone, that I can tolerate such careless questions as "what did you bring for lunch" when she may never see him again - and the hurt is such that it stops her very breath in her throat?

*Ahem*

Sorry about that.

Plus, Jane Eyre is one of those triggers which makes me remember all the books I was going to write, and I start thinking about those plots again. Stories I'm reading and stories I'm dreaming just seem to swirl around in my brain, and I have great difficulty focusing on the here and now.

Strangely, I don't have this problem with Austen. I think she might have been too tame - not quite "high" enough to take my brain and knock it sideways. Sure, Pride and Prejudice kind of rocks, but it doesn't have me off in la-la land so thoroughly.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though can have me reeling after just one sonnet. I think if I ever read Jane Eyre and Sonnets from the Portugese at the same time I would be rendered completely useless.

I'd probably enjoy it, though...