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Chargement... Souls Belated (1899)par Edith Wharton
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Wharton is so very good at exploring and capturing the psychology of characters and relationships, what drives the individual and how that influences the interactions. I love love love the tender yet vicious way she portrays the upper class. I could just dine off an "Edith Wharton dissection of the upper class" generator indefinitely. However, I found the ghost stories rather lacking but that's mostly personal preference. Also I don't know why I was so surprised at the first ghost story I encountered in this collection. I feel like I should've guessed that she wrote them since she and Henry James were such pals. A mini-book containing a short story about an unmarried Victorian couple who have been travelling around Europe since Lydia ran away from her husband to be with her lover. Now that her husband has divorced her, Lydia finds herself unwilling to contemplate re-marriage. "It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions - but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don't believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?" aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditorialePenguin 60s Classics (58) Est contenu dans
She stayed there for a long time, in the hypnotized contemplation, not of Mrs. Cope's present, but of her own past. Gannett, early that morning, had gone off on a long walk--he had fallen into the habit of taking these mountain tramps with various fellow lodgers; but even had he been within reach she could not have gone to him just then. She had to deal with herself first. She was surprised to find how, in the last months, she had lost the habit of introspection. Since their coming to the Hotel Bellosguardo she and Gannett had tacitly avoided themselves and each other. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Souls Belated starts mid-scene, two people on a train avoiding each other and the conversation they must have and the reader has no idea why or what the conversation is about. The ending isn't sad, but it isn't uplifting either; it's a defeat via success. I don't want to say much more than that - it's a short story and therefore easy to spoil.
But the writing is brilliant and the author perfectly encapsulates the snake-eating-its-own-tail dilemma these two find themselves in and then magnifies it with the woman's over-inflated sense of her own intellectualism. She has truly thought her way into a corner.
A fast read, but one that leaves the reader with plenty to mull over or enjoy as karmic justice. Sometimes the passion of your convictions can truly paint you into a corner and leave you exposed to your own hypocrisy. ( )