I took the bag load of books back to my little coastal library the other day and I reflected on how lucky I was to have such a sweet library in my favourite place in the world. Better still, after watching North and South the other night, how surprised was I to see a copy of Mrs.Gaskell’s book on the fiction shelves under G for Gaskell . . . and this is a library that services at peak times, under a thousand people.
Perhaps I was under a stone, or on another planet or at the very least in solitary confinement (something I do enjoy, actually), when the BBC’s adaptation of Elisabeth Gaskell’s North and South was released. Amazingly I was not all that familiar with Elisabeth Gaskell’s writings. At secondary school and university it had been Dickens, the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Xavier Herbert, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy among many others. Heavy, dour books to be reading when one was in the spring, nay, the summer of one’s life. Hardy’s brooding rural settings, Bronte’s even more stormy settings and Dickens who portrayed it as it was so to speak, was enough to drive a young, fancy-free student far from the serious and into the positively tacky. http://readingthepast.blogspot.com/2010/02/tackiness-extraordinaire
