Bleak House in Reading with Style

Dec 16, 2011 Janie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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Currently, reading the 1977, Norton Critical Annotated Edition of Bleak House
2025 Reading

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REREADING 2022 in order to make notes about and study the book. As I wrote down post, this is Dickens' most modern novel. It's a very interesting novel in how it is written. Notes completed (March 11, 2022)

REREADING
I've read Bleak House a few times in 2021. I was thinking about how important a novel it is and one that should be required reading at some point, because it is the novel that really c Currently, reading the 1977, Norton Critical Annotated Edition of Bleak House
2025 Reading

^^^^^^^^^^^
REREADING 2022 in order to make notes about and study the book. As I wrote down post, this is Dickens' most modern novel. It's a very interesting novel in how it is written. Notes completed (March 11, 2022)

REREADING
I've read Bleak House a few times in 2021. I was thinking about how important a novel it is and one that should be required reading at some point, because it is the novel that really changed the direction of how we think of novels and what they can do. It is the most modern novel of all 19th century novels, with exception to a few done much later in the century. I suppose Wilkie Collins mastered some techniques that gave us really good detective novels. As I reflect here now, Bleak House is Dickens' masterpiece but it is also a novel in which he challenged himself in style. Esther Summerson is really a modern character, a woman of low self-esteem (how many women are really like this. COUNTLESS) She is full of contradictions and absolutely REAL. And Dickens made her a main character who tells her own story. There are so many characters in this book that are ABSOLUTELY REAL and AUTHENTIC and not caricatures. I feel also that Dickens paid special attention to plot and structure in Bleak House. He knew what his idea was, his theme, his premise, and he stayed so true to it. But he offered the contradictions of feelings and that is the mark of greatness. In some ways, people tend to laugh at Dickens while all his stories are these sad little tragedies that are playing themselves out in life. He is writing from real life, his own. 1851 was an important year fro England, for London, and for Dickens, and great change came. Out of that troubled but exciting time, Dickens wrote Bleak House. It is emotionally honest, psychologically insightful, plotted with great complexity and understanding, and it's a story of good versus evil. It is so relevant now. And I am haunted by it, that Dickens wrote it in the 1850s just shocks and mesmerizes me. I am sure to read it again. Next time, I shall read it aloud over a longer period of time and annotate. And now, I want to know everything about Dickens. I've spent most of my life studying the Romantics and The Gothic. I wrote most of my college papers on them. And now I am going to spent the rest of my life on Charles Dickens and those who followed. I am smiling. He did not understand the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I love, but he understood how London worked, he understood the poor, he understood the darkness of capitalism, all before others came to challenge it. His psychology is based in his childhood suffering and in the 1830s when he was deciding what he would do, because he was capable of doing many things. A lawyer, an actor, who knows. He chose to write. He loved and lost. It nearly broke him. He made serious mistakes, he fell in love with someone he could never really have. And one can see all that complexity in this novel. I am undone. lol
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(This is definitely Dickens's masterpiece and one of the best novels I've ever read. Although it's a Victorian novel, there is something very modern about it. Maybe in the way Dickens used point-of-view. I would also say, it's the one novel he wrote where he attempted to write real women, instead of his idealized dream of one. It's Gothic, cruel, beautiful, and one hell of a story.)

This is a good example of how present tense should be used. As contrast. ...more

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