Sunday, May 30, 2021

“The radiant present”

Off to a concert. Lucy Snowe begins to see more of the city of Villette, capital of the fictional French-speaking kingdom of Labassecour.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

comments: 3

Fresca said...

Dear Miss Bronte,

It has come to our attention that your book does not contain any pictures. Readers like pictures.
From our stock, for a modest fee we would be pleased to offer you illustrations of certain phrases of yours:

brightly lit streets
walled-in gardens
stars through high windows
shadow of the future
radiant present

Sincerely, The Illustrated Writing Project

P.S. For a sample of our work, please peruse the provide quality cover art we provide for the Wordsworth Classics Editions.

[Have you seen these Wordsworth books?
Marz bought a used copy Middlemarch (because it was cheap) and promptly pasted a new cover on:
http://wordsworthclassics.com/collections/classics/middlemarch ]


Michael Leddy said...

You can find old editions of Brontë with pictures. But the pictures in a reader’s head are often better.

One reason I stopped writing a monthly post for a life-hackery site (years ago): a decree that every post had to include a photo (a stock photo). No thanks. See for instance the many English Department websites with a stock photo of a handwritten page and a fountain pen. Yeah, right.

Michael Leddy said...

I haven’t seen a Wordsworth book in a long time. I think they must be paying a lot less for their cover art now.