The Literary Melodrama Year Of Wonders

Anne matures throughout the course of her diary entries, moving from detailed accounts of basic activities to deeper, more profound thoughts about humanity and her own personal nature. “I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.” This shows that Anne matures through the course of her diary, she considers herself as a woman rather than a young girl and sets goals for herself that she wants to achieve. Anne becomes more optimistic even after she feels misunderstood by everyone and feels completely alone.

When first introduced to the narrator, readers quickly pick up on how observant she is to the world around her. However as the novel draws to a close, many quick events take place with little to no explanation or commentary from the

Anna herself comes to realise this in a non-egotistical way and says that she is a ‘woman who has faced more terrors than many warriors’. Opening in 1665, Brooks begins to outline the events of the plague year that enabled Anna to ‘shine’ and become the young woman who has faced the terrors of the mob, midwifery and mining. Instead of joining the grieving mob who attacked Mem and Anys Gowdie, the town healers, accusing them of being witches and blaming them for their losses to the plague, Anna fights with all her strength to bring the crowd to their senses. With her own ‘babies. rotting in the ground’ she too could have given in to the superstitions of her time and sought revenge by blaming the ‘witches’ but she chose the harder but more reasonable way and was bruised and battered for having done

As for Anna’s crimes, on a social and familial level Anna, having not been married off at an appropriate age, pursued sexual relationships with not one but two men out-of-wedlock and without her father’s knowing. Furthermore, Anna was accused of stealing from her father relentlessly and of leading a “scandalous, undisciplined, and reprehensible life” (3). These crimes, in addition to the consequent reactions of her family and city would provide the foundation out of which the feud would fester.

Due to the novel’s reverse chronological order, the reader often draws parallels and fills in the gaps as the novel progresses. An example of this is on page 9, where Anna confides her sentiments to the reader, stating that losing herself, “in someone else’s thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories.” This is later built upon in the novel, where the source of her gloomy sentiments is revealed to the reader.

Because her father had such a high standing and proud nature within the city, Anna’s romances with the two men were sought to be terminated by both her father as well as these other councilmen. Anna was also accused of stealing from her father, taking money, wine, and sold other possessions of his for a sum of money in order to buy things for herself, and keep her rendezvous with her lovers a secret. “And her father and brother were the ones who discovered, confiscated, and preserved the extremely rare cache of her love letters” (3). This was ultimately the fall of Anna’s character, as her father then attacked her, banished her from his home, and took away her inheritance, which would start the legal battle with her father and other family members for many years to come (2). Anna would take this court case to her grave as it would never be settled, and she would go through many misfortunes while trying to gain the legal right to her inheritance.

The novel in which Jane Eyre stars in can be seen criticizing many aspects of those times such as the role and nature of women, child negligence and social hardships for those in a lesser class. Jane Eyre’s alienation from society allows for a greater reveal of the story’s culture, values, and assumptions. It’s presented through the use of gender, class and character conflicts throughout the story. On multiple occasions, Jane is judged for the presented factors reflecting the type of society Jane lives in and what the times were like at that time.

The vulnerability of Jane Eyre's childhood, loss of innocence and exposure to death, rejection, abuse and disease at such an early age due to her initial complicated family background, being an orphan and thus avoiding poverty through her aunt’s charity, shows the initial 'violent' gothic convention used in this novel.

Anna’s id appears to be the dominant aspect of her personality, especially in the beginning of the story,

Though the characters in Year of Wonders are unable to take a physical journey due to their actions, their circumstances cause them to embark on many spiritual, mental and emotional journeys through the course of the novel. Anna Frith, for instance, is forced during the plague year to overcome the deaths of her sons and family, and take upon many new roles that she otherwise would not have. The text also takes the reader on an imaginative journey. With characters that show human failings and its

However, despite changes, the literary world remained predominantly male, and women writers not encouraged, or taken seriously. Consequently, to counteract this Emily Bronte published her novel Wuthering Heights, under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights is the story of domesticity, obsession, and elemental divided passion between the intertwined homes of the Earnshaw’s residing at the rural farmhouse Wuthering Heights, and the Linton family of the more genteel Thrushcross Grange. This essay will discuss how the language and narrative voices established a structural pattern of the novel, and how these differing voices had a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the overall story.

Year after year Mary would find a way to one-up Anna in everything that they did. This created an evil ambition in Anna because all she ever wanted was to do one thing better than Mary so that she could finally receive her father’s approval. One day Anna decided that she was to pick all of her mother’s crops and go into town to sell them. Her reasoning for doing so was that her father loved two things fighting and her mom. By helping her mom with this huge task her father would have no choice, but to praise her for actions.

First, the structure of the story reflects Anna's state of mind. The events in the story seem to take place with a total disregard for timekeeping.

The final chapter’s of Bronte’s Jane Eyre have been a subject of discussion since it’s first publication. Many say the the ending does not fit and other argue that it does. There is a lot of evidence pointing to the latter. The conclusion reveals the fate of Mr. Rochester and Jane, Adele, and of St. John. All of the endings, a mixture of both happy and tragic, to fit with the entire story and can explained because of the Victorian era. This essay will argue that the conclusion of this novel, more specifically that Jane does go back to Mr. Rochester, is extremely fitting to both the plot and the essence of the novel.

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre emerges with a unique voice in the Victorian period for the work posits itself as a sentimental novel; however, it deliberately becomes unable to fulfill the genre, and then, it creates an altogether divergent novel that demonstrates its superiority by adding depth of structure in narration and character portrayal. Joan D. Peters’ essay, Finding a Voice: Towards a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in the Narration of Jane Eyre positions Gerard Genette’s theory of convergence, which is that the movement of the fiction towards a confluence of protagonist and narrator, is limited as the argument does not fully flesh out the parodies that Charlotte Bronte incorporates into her work. I will argue that in the novel