billybookblog

*contains spoilers* Flaubert once famously declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” But what did he mean? The two persons could not have been more different, nor could they have led more different lives – unless one of them turned out to be Martian. Emma Bovary, in her inherently aspirational character, is a social creature intent on mingling with the finest of mid-nineteenth century French society, regardless of her or her long-suffering husband’s low status. She is especially attracted to the professionals and the aristocracy, and in order to elevate herself to her inwardly canonised ideal, her abstract notion of perfection – that unattainable divineness imposed on her by her experiences in a convent in Rouen at a very young age – she becomes their plaything. And it is this pursuit for the ideal perfection that essentially leads her to madness and death. Flaubert, meanwhile was a recluse who mingled only with the literary clique when he had to – and was most notably a man: that privilege...

*contains spoilers* Although not as laden with aptronyms as Dickens’s social novel Hard Times , which was notably serialised just before Gaskell’s North and South in Dickens’s own publication Household Words in 1854, the two bear some rather striking resemblances. And though the one would be considered more matter-of-fact and to-the-point than the other (not surprisingly Hard Times over North and South , taking into account Dickens’s literary and social prestige), Gaskell’s credentials as a genuine Northern Lass should be sympathised with and given most credence, narratives aside. As the title suggests, Gaskell takes us from the North to the South, back and forth, to and fro, and not just between London and Darkshire (which stands in for an industrial Manchester of the nineteenth century), but Hampshire and some small towns in between. Starting in the neutral zone of aristocratic London, Gaskell gives us scope for the different modes of bourgeois and working-class toil either side o...