[from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, p20 in the Norton Critical edition, 1996.
Victor Frankenstein describes his cousin and future wife, Elizabeth Lavenza, when both were children:]
---Every one adored Elizabeth. If the servants had any requests to make, it was always through her intercession. We were strangers to any species of disunion and dispute; for although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude. I was more calm and philosophical than my companion; yet my temper was not so yielding. My application was of longer endurance; but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aërial creation of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy; which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
[This passage interests me both in Mary Shelley (as a woman) writing a male character describing a female character (and the influences of the Georgian period, which i have only begun to explore) and in (of course) the word choice ("Every one"), punctuation, and character of the writing which i do so enjoy. Perhaps i could find a worthwhile doctoral thesis in the literature transition from the Georgian to the Victorian.
Gentle Reader, enjoy the day!]
No comments:
Post a Comment