Anna Reads... The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

One of my tentative New Year's Resolutions was that, in an effort to make myself a happier person, I should read more.

That's not to say I don't read - on a 'reading day' while studying, I easily get through a hundred pages, sometimes two hundred - but I realised that I had stopped reading for fun. With all the reading I had been slogging for my less ... appealing classes, all the joy had been taken out of it, and I was only reading for my degree, rather than for leisure. I've been called a bookworm, my family joke that I used to eat books rather than read them, and yet, there I was, not reading. It almost felt like I was losing a part of myself, to be a touch hyperbolic about matters.

I'm currently making my way through Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. According to my Kindle, I'm only actually a quarter of the way through, but it struck me as peculiar, considering my long-standing acquaintance with nineteenth century literature.

Repeatedly, already, Anne's main character (who, unusually even now for a female writer, is male) debunks various features of the gendering of society at the time. It is not only that Gilbert suggest that his aim as a husband, rather than to enjoy the loving attention of his wife to his personal desires and happiness (such as in the matter of the contents of the tea-table), would be to ensure the happiness of his wife in the same matter. It is also that his current love-interest, Helena, steadfastly refuses to bring up her son in a way that is familar to us in the modern age. That is, not raising him to be the masculine ideal of manliness, discouraging her son, still a child, from drinking so as to protect him from later vice, and shooting down the disapproval of her neighbours in this matter.

For obvious reasons, this calls to mind all the debate about raising children in a non-gendered manner, and the discussion I see about how the way boys are raised leaves them with deep-seated emotional issues. It is, of course, possible that I'm only reading these things into the work because of my vague awareness of the issues. But regardless of this, my point is that I'm really quite enjoying the, shall I say, progressive themes in Anne Bronte's work, in comparison to the usual 'please your husband, raise your children to continue these biases' commentary on family life of the time.

Anna Loves... The First Days of Spring

I make no secret of my country-bumpkin tendencies. Although I love living in cities for the ease of walking everywhere and having plenty to do, a not-so-small part of me prefers the relative quietness and open spaces of the countryside. My favourite flowers lean towards daffodils and daisies over peonies and roses; I have a favourite tree (I don't know why, it just is); and my first instinct when the sun appears isn't to find a pub with a garden, but somewhere green and open. Sunday being one of the better days we've had so far this year, and a quick trip back to the family homestead on the cards, I made the most of the changing seasons, romping across the fields between villages along the way and enjoying the blue skies and ever-present daffodils in all sorts of places - grassy banks, hedgerows, the chicken pen chez maman... That's not to say that Bristol is lacking in daffodils, but they seem far more planned here than they do 'out in the sticks'

 Banks of daffs on the roadside

 Stopping by my favourite tree

 The latest residents of the chicken enclosure

A Black Rock (not pictured), a Speckled, and a Bluebell