On Meeting Mrs Graham and a Question.

I read another chapter-and-a-bit of Tenant tonight. A few hints of lyrical expression showed themselves once the narrator was tramping the wild moorland on an afternoon in the desultory and dying days of October, so I’m hoping there will be no dearth of outdoor scenes in this relatively hefty tome.

The writing style continues to be a little ponderous, however, as most 19^th century literature tends to be. (It’s why I could never finish a Wilkie Collins novel, and could only tolerate short stories by Thomas Hardy.) Ponderous prose is not to my taste, a fact which further enhances my enjoyment of Charlotte’s prose which slips down the gullet like a chocolate milkshake served at room temperature.

As for the characters, it’s very early days as yet. So far I’m finding the narrator of the story (a gentleman farmer) irritatingly presumptuous, but the MC – Mrs Graham, the eponymous tenant of Wildfell Hall – most engaging. Her strength of character and refusal to be cowed by the conventions and mores of the time make her both commendable and attractive. And since, as far as I’m aware, she is the heroine of the piece, it must say something about Anne Brontë, her creator. Mustn’t it?

Onwards.

*  *  *

I keep wanting to write a post about a fact of life which is a great mystery to me: How do two young people, pristine in mind and body, manage to tie the nuptial knot and still be together sixty year later when they’re bent, stiff, heavily wrinkled, deformed in shape and bearing, and wracked with functional degradation? I see them often, you know. I do.

If I were still married – and this desire to write the post occurred to me when I realised on Saturday that it would have been my wedding anniversary – I would expect both of us to be ashamed of keeping one another’s company at a distance of less than 100 yds.

I considered the question at some length and arrived at three preliminary theories. But they wouldn’t do; the matter began to get complicated, so that’s why I’m saying no more.

(I do sometimes wonder, though, whether my ex-wife is still alive and what she probably looks like now. My inadequate mind does not produce the pretties of pictures, but since she was seven years younger than me I expect she’s probably still chewing the cud somewhere in remotest Wales. That’s the place to which she decamped with her beau, an archaeologist-cum-woodworker who was probably a lot more interesting than I was. And is it merely coincidence that he had the same name as an ex-racehorse currently domiciled in the Shire? I expect it is. I append below a picture of her when we first met. I imagine her features will have evolved somewhat by now.)