blue hyacinth--cherish all my life

The Gist of the Story:

Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw live at Wuthering Heights with their 
daughter, Catherine, and their son, Hindley. One day Mr. 
Earnshaw brings back with an orphan boy whom he christens
 Heathcliff. Soon Mr. Earnshaw and Catherine grow to love 
young Heathcliff for he is brave, sturdy, and self-sufficient. 
Because of this, Hindley grows jealous of Heathcliff. When 
Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley becomes master of Wuthering 
Heights and behaves even more cruelly to Heathcliff. One 
night Heathcliff and Catherine spy on a grand ball being given 
at Thrushcross Grange and Catherine is bitten in the leg. Then 
Catherine stays to heal her leg in the house where she meets the
 kindly, civilized, Lintons, their charming son, Edgar, and lovely
 daughter, Isabella. When Catherine returns home, she confides
 in Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, that although she really loves
 Heathcliff, she thinks she will marry Edgar. Heathcliff, overhearing 
the last part of the conversation, leaves in a fury, determined 
to make his way in the world before he returns to claim Catherine
 for his wife. Not hearing from Heathcliff for three years, she 
marries Edgar. One day heathcliff returns and startles the Lintons
 with his elegant clothes and fine manners. Accordingly, Heathcliff
 moves in Wuthering Heights and being taking his revenge. 
Ultimately Heathcliff becomes the real master of Wuthering Heights 
and he also gets Isabella to elope with him. Before Catherine dies 
given birth to her daughter, Cathy, she confesses to Heathcliff 
that she was wrong in marrying Edgar when she really loved him. 
Heathcliff , consumed with guilt and frustrated love, calls upon 
Catherine’s ghost to haunt him forever. Hindley dies of drink, 
and his son, Hareton, is brought up by Heathcliff in the most 
squalid and brutal fashion. Isabella, broken-hearted, leaves for 
London and 12 years after her son Linton’s birth, she dies. 
Heathcliff forces Cathy to marry Linton. Edgar dies and Cathy
 inherits Thrushcross Grange. Soon after, the sickly Linton dies, 
and Cathy becomes dependent on Heathcliff who now controls
 both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff, 
sick of his vengeance and yearning to be united in death with his
 lost Catherine, starves himself and dies. Now Cathy and Hareton
 are alone and Cathy decides to give him the education. 
Catherine’s grave is found between her husband’s and Heathcliff’s. 
Local legend has it that on stormy nights the erstwhile lovers, 
Catherine and Heathcliff, are seen to roam the bleak moors they 
loved so much when they were young.

Critical Opinion:

Wuthering Heights is one of the supreme masterpieces of Englisn
 romanticism. In it, Emily Bronte explores two worlds: the world 
of the passionate emotions of love and revenge as symbolized by 
Wuthering Heights, the rational, civilized world symbolized by 
Thrushcross Grange. If the world of Wuthering Heights is often 
cruel and barbaric, as in Heathcliff’s monstrous revenge against 
Hindley and the Lintons, it is also capable of passionate love that 
transcends even death. If the world of Thrushcross Grange is cozy,
 comfortable, and civilized, it is also somewhat bloodless and 
ineffectual. The pitting of these two worlds of passion and reason 
against each other over the course of three generations is the essence of the book.

The Gist of the Story:

   When Gulliver’s medical practice in London fails because he 
is too ethical, he books passage as a ship’s doctor aboard the
 Antelope for the South Seas. Surviving in a storm, he becomes 
the prisoner of the natives of Lilliput whose people are six inches 
tall. Though Gulliver helps the Lilliputians haul the Blefuscudians
 fleet back, the Lilliputians want to kill him. So he seeks shelter 
in Blefuscu and then he gets a chance to return home.

    Soon Gulliver becomes restless and sets sail for India aboard 
the Adventure. He landed in Brobdingnag whose people are 
giants as gross and coarse-featured. After two years of constant 
peril, Gulliver escapes one day when a giant bird lifts the box in 
which he lives and drops the box into the sea. Then Gulliver is saved.

  Soon he sets out to sea a third time. He lands on the island of 
Balnibarbi whose people called Laputians are normal in size and 
have only two interests in life: music and mathematics. Gulliver 
then returns to England after he travels most of this country.

   Staying with his family for a short time, he sets sail for foreign 
parts. He lands in a shore where he is befouled by ape-like men 
known as Yahoos and saved by some horses named Houyhnhnms,
 the masters of the island. Gulliver finds himself living happily with
 the horses in a totally rational society. However, the Houyhnhnm 
Grand Assembly decides that Gulliver must really be a Yahoo 
although he may seem more civilized and orders him to leave. 
When Gulliver finally returns home from his last voyage, he is 
unable to endure his family, and for a long time is able to bear only 
the company of horses.

Critical Opinion:

A satirical fantasy in the form of a travel book, Gulliver’s Travels
 is known both as a delightful children’s book and as the most 
bitter attack on human depravity in the English Language. Some 
of the objects of Swift’s scathing satire are politics, court intrigue,
 bigotry, and human selfishness and cruelty in all their forms. In 
his four travels to distant parts if the earth, Gulliver discovers that 
for all their physical and cultural differences, men everywhere are 
basically the same. Human beings are “the most pernicious race 
of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the
 surface of the earth.”

The Gist of the Story:

When Mr. Bingley, a rich young bachelor, rents Netherfield Park, 
one of the neighboring estates, excitement stirs in the Bennet family, 
which includes five marriageable daughters. Soon after, the romance 
between Bingley and Jane, the oldest daughter, seems to flourish and 
finally they get married. Mr. Bingley’s friend, Darcy is attracted to 
Elizabeth, the second daughter, but Darcy’s coldly aristocratic pride
 and Elizabeth’s instinctive feminine prejudice against him make them 
misunderstand first. Fortunately they get chances to know each other 
and are deeply in love with each other and finally they marry. Lydia, 
the youngest daughter, runs off with Wickham, who has been carrying 
on an intrigue with Darcy’s sister. Finding them in London, Darcy 
pays Wickham’s many debts and gives him ￡1000 with which to 
marry Lydia. Mrs. Bennet, having married off three of her daughters, 
is filled with joy. Mr. Bennet philosophically awaits any further suitors 
who may come along.

Critical Opinion:

Pride and Prejudice is a perfect example of a social comedy based 
on the interaction of love and money. The uniqueness of Jane Austen’s 
art lies in the way she plumbs such emotional depths within the 
extremely circumscribed life she knows. Sympathizing equally with 
the needs of the individual and the often conflicting demands of 
social decorum, she finds comedy in the resulting stresses.

The Gist of the Story:

Dr. Manette becomes a witness to St. Evremonde’s guilt and 
hence is thrown into the Bastille in France. 18 years later, his 
mind failing, Dr. Manette is brought back to London by his 
daughter, Lucie, who meets Charles Darnay, who is the heir 
of the St. Evremondes but prefers to eke out a living in London
 as a French tutor. They marry and when their girl is six, the 
revolution breaks out in France with the storming of the hated
 Bastille and the release of its pathetic prisoners. Darnay’s uncle
 is murdered in his bed and Darnay is arrested soon after his 
arrival in France and accused of being a returned aristocrat. 
Darnay is brought to trial and condemned to be guillotined 
within 24 hours for he must pay for the sins of his ancestors. 
Finally Sydney Carton, who deeply loves Lucie and closely 
resembles Darnay, manages to gain admittance into Darnay’s 
cell and take Darnay’s place at the guillotine. Darnay is reunited 
with his family and they make good their escape from France. 
Sydney Carton, noble to the last, declares before the guillotine 
descends, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever 
done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

Critical Opinion:

Deeply impressed by a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s French 
Revolution, Dickens determined to try his hand once again at 
historical romance. However, he did not wish to rewrite the 
history of the revolution and tried to capture the atmosphere 
of the time in a tale that would point the moral: that blood 
begets blood; revenge is self-perpetuating; and only the kindness
 and selflessness of the individual human heart can terminate
 a series of bloodletting as ferocious as those unleashed in 
revolutionary France.

The Gist of the Story:

Orphaned as a baby, Jane Eyre is placed in the care of a coldhearted 
aunt, Mrs. Reed. She pampers her own spoiled children and brings 
Jane up as little better than a servant. One day, as punishment for a 
bit of childish willfulness, she puts Jane into the room in which Mr. 
Reed died. The child falls into a faint and becomes very ill. After 
being nursed back to health by a nurse, Jane is sent to the Lowood
 School, where Jane is befriended by a Miss Temple and learns her 
lessons rapidly. Jane becomes a teacher at the school, but leaves at
 18 to become governess to the precocious Adele living in isolated
 Thornfield Manor, where Jane meets Rochester and finally falls in 
love with him. On their wedding day the service is interrupted by Mr. 
Mason who announces that the marriage is illegal because Rochester
 still has a living wife. Forced to reveal the truth at last, Rochester 
takes Jane to the forbidden chamber on the third floor where Jane 
sees a hideous creature, crawling on all fours in her madness. 
Rochester explains that the creature is Mason’s sister Bertha whom 
he had been tricked into marrying 15 years before in Jamaica and 
who comes from a family of lunatics and degenerates. Though Jane 
is filled with sympathy for the misanthropic Rochester, she departs. 
Close to starvation, she is helped by a clergyman, River, who turns 
out to be her cousin and asks for her hand and also tells her that her
 uncle has recently died and left Jane ￡20000. While Jane is 
considering the offer, she has a dream that Rochester is calling for 
her. So she journeys back to Thorafield where she is shocked to 
find it gutted by fire and completely in ruins. Jane finally finds 
Rochester, blind and one arm amputated, whose wife has died in 
the fire. They marry and soon have a child and two years later 
Rochester regains the sight of one eye.

Critical Opinion:

Jane Eyre is infused with passionate involvement and poetic 
imagination, sometimes bordering on the melodramatic. The 
novel really centers on Jane’s moral growth from the impudent, 
unhappy girl rebelling against her aunt’s oppressive religiosity
 to the woman of delicate sensibility and strong character who 
eventually marries the crippled Rochester. Such experiences 
as those in the Lowood School, the teaching of the spoiled 
but adorable Adele, and the interrupted first marriage to 
Rochester give Jane strength to endure the blows of fate that 
eventually bring her to serene womanhood. Jane Eyre is in 
some respects a Cinderella-like fantasy of wish fulfillment, but 
one infused with an original and powerful romantic genius.

The Gist of the Story:

Clym Yeobright returns to the heath after a brilliant career in the 
diamond business in Paris because he is sick of the sophisticated 
life there. Eustacia Vye, with a loathing for the brooding and 
impersonal heath, always hopes for a great love which would take
 her away. Clym marries Eustacia and begins studying to be a 
school-teacher. Eustacia becomes increasingly disillusioned with 
her moody husband as she sees her chances of going to Paris fading. 
She knows that Wildeve is still willing to run away with her, and one 
night searching in the dark for the spot where she is to meet Wildeve, 
Eustacia loses her way and drowns in Shadwater Weir. Wildeve 
jumps in to save her, but drowns, too. In turn Clym tries to rescue him, 
and is saved from the treacherous waters only by the arrival of Digory 
Venn, who later marries Thomasin, Clym’s cousin and Wildeve’s once wife.

Critical Opinion:

Man in The Return of the Native is seen as the plaything of the gods, 
buffeted about by fate and ultimately destroyed by an uncaring universe.
 Hardy’s real interest is in the struggle of his characters against their 
destiny which Hardy views with a unique combination of irony and 
compassion. The tragedy of Eustacia and Clym is only partially caused 
by fate and coincidence. Essentially it stems, as all great tragedy does,
 from character. Hardy finds the philosophic basis for his fiction much 
as the Greek dramatists had done centuries before. The plot of The 
Return of the Native is carefully organized, each section of the novel 
having its individual climax, starting slowly and building inevitably to 
the final disasters. For the point of Hardy’s coincidences is that life is 
not rational; events do not happen as in a “well-made” novel, but blind 
chance constantly intervenes in man’s fate.

The Gist of the Story:
In the early days of the 19^th century, two close friends are graduating 
from Miss Pinkerton’s genteel academy for girls. They are Amelia 
Sedley, the gentle, well-brought-up daughter of a rich London 
businessman, and Becky Sharp, the poor orphaned daughter of an 
artist and a French opera girl. Amelia is kind-hearted and innocent. 
Becky is totally selfish and determined to make good in the world 
by fair means or foul.

Amelia marries George, whose father refuses to see Amelia or his 
grandson after George died on the field of Waterloo. When Becky 
shows Amelia a letter that George had written her on the eve of 
Waterloo, begging her to elope with him, Amelia accepts Dobbin’s 
proposal and they live happily in the country.

Becky marries Rawdon, who finally leaves her after he is hauled off 
one day to a prison and returns home finding her alone with Lord 
Steyne. Becky lives hard and allows Rawdon’s father to adopt her 
child. Excluded from the London aristocracy, she journeys 
everywhere , picking up men and living off them for a while. When
 she meets Jos, Amelia’s brother, she once again manages to 
entrance him and becomes his mistress. When Jos dies a few months 
later under mysterious circumstances, Becky is at last a rich woman---
wealthy enough now to play the part of a widowed Lady Bountiful, 
a role she greatly enjoys.

Critical Opinion:

Vanity Fair is perhaps the greatest English comic novel of manners, 
embracing in its many pages a vast spectrum of English life during 
the Napoleonic period. In the tradition of Fielding and Jane Austen, 
he managed to portray a society filled with hypocrisy and greed that 
is recognizable even today.

The novel’s brilliant structure follows the rise and fall in the fortunes
 of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. It is through this dramatic 
graphing of social success and failure that Thackeray provides his 
memorable fleshing-out of Ecclesiastes and of the marketplace in 
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Gist of the Story:

Young Pip is an orphan boy being brought up by his older sister 
and her good-natured husband, Joe, the village blacksmith. One 
day Pip meets Magwitch, an escaped convict, who promises to 
reward Pip for helping him. Before long, the lonely Miss Havisham 
insists that Pip come often to play with her ward, Estella, who is 
the most beautiful girl Pip has ever seen. One day, Mr. Jaggers, 
a pompous London lawyer, arrives with the news that money has 
been secretly provided for Pip to go to the city and become a 
gentleman. Pip, elated at this prospect, assumes that the money 
is coming from Miss Havisham with the hope that it will make him 
into a desirable husband for Estella. Pip takes to the idle life of a 
London dandy and becomes a snob. On his 21^st birthday, Magwitch 
visits him and reveals he is actually Estella’s father and Pip’s secret
 benefactor, Pip is horrified. Nevertheless, Pip vows to help Magwitch, 
who finally kills his enemy and dies while awaiting trial. Estella comes
 to London herself and marries Bentley. Miss Havisham dies in a fire. 
Under the stress of recent events, Pip falls ill and is nursed by the 
faithful Joe. Pip finally realizes how wrong he has been snobbish and
 returns to the blacksmith shop. Many years later Pip pays his final 
visit to the place where Miss Havisham’s mansion once stood, when
 he meets Estella there, who is now widowed. They now understand 
they will never part from each other again.

Critical Opinion:

In many ways, Great Expectations is Dickens’ finest novel. It is less
 diffuse and better organized. It has a real theme---the corrosive effect 
of snobbery---treated in a serious and profound way.

Great Expectations is an ironical title. The expectations of wealth that 
Jaggers presents to Pip seem great indeed, but turn out to be ashes in
 the mouth as Pip scorns his old friend Joe, loses Estella to Bentley, 
loses Magwitch, and is unable even to rescue Miss Havisham.

Great Expectations is also a brilliant commentary on the deadening 
influence that the past can exert on the present if one allows an ancient
 injury to poison one’s life. Because she was jilted on her wedding 
day, Miss Havisham has vowed vengeance on all men. For a time 
she seems successful---her soured love nearly wrecks Pip’s life.

The psychological insight into these thwarted lives shows Dickens 
at the zenith of his powers. The plot of this novel is more spare and 
austere than most of his others. Gone are the digressions and 
superfluous characters with which Dickens tended to pad his earlier 
novels. All is subordinated in Great Expectations to the theme: a 
devastating commentary on the moral perversions that wealth and
 the expectations of it can create in the human heart.

The Gist of the Story:

Young Jude Fawley, and orphaned baker’s boy, is introduced to 
the magic world of learning by Richard Phillotson, who goes to 
the great university town of Christminster in order to get an 
advanced degree. Jude wishes to go, too, but must content 
himself with the Latin textbooks . Jude eagerly studies the books 
but realizes they are no substitute for a formal education. As he 
grows into young manhood, Jude, in his inexperience, fancies 
himself in love with the lusty Arabella Donn. Their marriage 
becomes a nightmare . Arabella leaves him and emigrates to 
Australia. And Jude determines to journey to Christminster. 
Denied admission, he takes a job there as a stonemason to enter 
the life of Christminster. In his loneliness, Jude eventually seeks 
out Sue Bridehead, his cousin, and suggests that she leave her
 job to assist his old schoolmaster, Phillotson. When Sue marries 
Phillotson, Jude, discouraged and defeated, encounters his wife 
Arabella who has returned to England. Gradually tales come to 
Jude of Sue’s intense unhappiness with Phillotson, who willingly 
grants Sue a divorce. Jude, too, divorces Arabella. Sue, an 
agnostic, prefers to live out of wedlock with Jude. The pair live 
in reasonable happiness, but soon word that they are not really 
married begins to circulate. Jude is forced to travel about the 
countryside looking for work and his health begins to fail. One 
evening when Sue finds that Little Father Time, Arabella’s son, 
has hanged her two children and himself in a gesture of despair, 
she falls into a dead faint and even loses the baby she has been
 carrying. Sue now becomes a religious fanatic. Filled with a 
sense of sin, she tells Jude she can have no more to do with him
 but must return to her first husband, Phillotson. Jude takes to 
drink and is again tricked into marrying Arabella. Despite his 
precarious health, Jude goes out into the rain to see Sue once 
more, but the meeting is a failure. Jude dies tasting the final bitter
 irony as he hears through the window the shouts and cheers from 
the nearby theatre where the Christminster faculty are conferring 
honorary degrees on a group of undeserving aristocratic dilettantes.

Critical opinions:

With Jude the Obscure, his last novel, hardy reached the pinnacle
 of his art and the depths of his pessimism. Unlike his other novels, 
Jude is not illuminated by the faintest ray of light or hope. Hardy 
brooded over the cruelty inherent in the difficulty of obtaining an 
annulment when a couple is patently mismated and over the cruelty
 society inflicted on people living together illicitly. He offers no glib
 solution to this problem, however, for Sue Bridehead, the believer
 in free love who is opposed to binding contracts between men and
 women, is scathingly portrayed as a frigid, deeply neurotic woman 
who can hardly solve her own personal problems, let alone those 
of society. As always in genuine tragedy, a panacea is neither 
suggested now does one seem remotely possible.

The other major target of Jude, academic snobbery, was a subject 
of much concern in Hardy’s day. Christminster is a combination of 
Oxford and Cambridge, toadying, in Hardy’s view, to the inept sons 
of aristocrats instead of offering education to those genuinely 
desiring it and capable of appreciating it. Jude the Obscure is a 
powerful document for higher education based on merit rather 
than on social position. For if anyone deserves as good an 
education as his society can provide it is the serious-minded Jude, 
always striving to better himself and always excluded by a society 
that closes ranks at his approach.

The Gist of the Story:

 Young Jim Hawkins has been helping his parents run the Admiral 
Benbow Inn, near Black Hill Cove, a secluded spot in the English 
west country. One day an old pirate Billy Bones comes to board.
 He has a map showing the location of buried treasure left on an 
island by Captain Flint. Billy’s fellows come to the inn several times 
to attack him but fail. When Bill has a second stroke and dies, Jim 
finds the map and shows it to the local squire Trelawney who 
decides to equip a ship and sail for the island with Dr. Livesey and 
Jim. The crew look to Silver as their real leader for they have known 
him since they sailed together with Captain Flint. On the island Jim 
is held captive by the pirates who want to kill him and depose Silver
 as their leader. Finally Jim’s companions come to the rescue and 
rout the pirates. When the ship puts in at a West Indies port, Silver 
escapes with his share of the treasure and is never heard of again. 
The adventurers finally reach Bristol and divide the remainder of 
the fortune. Jim decides he has had enough adventure to last him 
the rest of his days.

Critical Opinion:

Treasure Island has nevertheless endured while much of the boy’s 
fiction of its time has been relegated to the dust heap. Stevenson 
came at just the right moment in English literary history. With the 
death of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, English fiction had 
more or less run out of steam. The novels of the 1880’s tended to 
be either absurdly snobbish accounts of “high society” or dreary, 
naturalistic imitations of Zola, sordidly detailed accounts of the 
stifling common places of lower-middle-class life. Stevenson, 
with his superb tale-spinner’s imagination, gave English fiction 
a lift and a new dimension.