Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Mary Taylor to Mrs. Gaskell

Charlotte's friend Mary Taylor telling Elizabeth Gaskell about the first time she saw Charlotte Bronte.


Mary Taylor, Charlotte's school friend, to Mrs. Gaskell

"I first saw her coming out of the covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. she was coming to school at Miss Wooler's. When she appeared in the schoolroom her dress was changed but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so very short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch sight of it. She was very shy and nervous and spoke with a strong Irish accent."


Blessings
~Elizabeth

Did Elizabeth fall of the face of the Earth?

So sorry that I am have not been posting! I got really busy with school and life kind of got in the way, so I took a little brake from blogger. Which was actually very nice, but now I would like to get back to it! :) So I will be trying to get back, but don't expect to much.

Advent started for the Orthodox church on November 15. I have a one year Bible, but I have not been doing the one year part of the plan. I am reading little bits when I can which I suppose is better than none. I am also reading A Simple Path for this fast season. I read part of it last Lent so I hope to finish this Advent/Nativity fast.

I have been reading other books to, so hopefully I will maybe get some book reviews done. I would also like to post a lot of my favorite Christmas music. I LOVE Christmas music, it is some of my favorite music in the whole world. So I would like to share some of my favorites. I have a Christmas plays list, but not all my favorites are on playlist so I will post some as well. :)

I don't know if I ever mentioned before that I joined my church's choir. I really really love it!!! I am especially excited for the Christmas songs we are working on. :)

I am also excited because I will be babysitting tomorrow! I am looking forward to it!

Anyway that is all for now. Right now my sister has a friend over and they are working on building a model of one of those rock throwing things they used in Narnia & and real life to. I can't remember what it is called. Even if I did I am not sure I would be able to spell it.

Blessings
~Elizabeth

PS. I also want to post some pictures of my latest art projects. :)

Sunday, November 6, 2011

My guest post

I had to lovely honor to be able to guest post on Miss Elizabeth Rose's blog Living On Literary Lane. To read my guest post click Here.

Blessings
~Elizabeth

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Preface to Mary Barton

This was the preface to the book Mary Barton. I found it really interesting, and wanted to share is with you all! It shed a completely different new light on North & South, and also on the book I was about to read.

"Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester, but with relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was to find a framework for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other men. A little manifestation of this sympathy, and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid open them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seeming happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous - especially from the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up - were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints what might be resignation to God's own will, and turns into revenge, in too many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.

The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which time to time convulses this dumb people; the agony of suffering without the sympathy of the happy, or of erroneously believing that such is the case. If it be an error, that the woes, which come with ever-returning tidelike flood to overwhelm the workmen in our manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers, it is the at any rate an error so bitter in its consequences to all parties, that whatever public effort can do in the way of legislation, or private effort in the way of merciful deeds, or helpless love in the way of 'widow's mites,' should be done, and that speedily, to disabuse the work-people of so miserable a misapprehension. At present they seem to me to be left in a sate where in lamentations and tears are thrown aside as useless, buy in which the lips are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite.

I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, that agreement or disagreement is unintentional.

To myself the idea which I have formed of the sate of feelings among too many of the factory-people in Manchester, and which endeavoured to represent in this tale (completed above a year ago) has received some confirmation from the events which have so recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent."
~Elizabeth Gaskell October, 1848