I'm only just watching Ruby's reading wrap up for January and...well, there's a list:
- she uses "disjunct" as a noun which is so, so jarring to my ears. Things are either disjunct, or there is a disjunction between them, but Ruby says that the book is about "the disjunct" between something
- she says On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a memoir but it's a novel, memoir is used for non-fiction
- she says the end of Jane Eyre doesn't "sit quite right" and I assume that's because of the marriage at the end. Personally I didn't find the ending incongruous with the rest of the novel at all, and Ruby also suggests maybe Charlotte Bronte ended the novel that way because "she thought it wouldn't get published if she didn't write a moral ending" but Wuthering Heights was published the same year and there is so much explicit immorality and amorality in that novel that it just doesn't really make sense for Ruby to suggest that. For a self-framed Victorian nut Ruby seems to have quite an inflexible idea of what they were like
- why did she announce halfway through she was going for lunch? Why not just...go and then come back and carry on with the reviews?
- on a positive note, her friend Blakeney's book looks so cute! The art is beautiful and that children's book is such an accomplishment, especially when compared to Erimentha AND all of the profits are going to Feeding Britain - take note about how to actually help and donate to charities, Ruby
- "precent"
Re; Jane Eyre, 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall' was another Bronte novel that dealt with topics that were considered 'taboo' for the time, and in great detail. I was looking through her reviews and iirc she wrote about reading it at the age of 13 and loving it? It details domestic abuse, drinking and adultery so it really doesn't seem like her type of thing now, let alone when she was a young teenager. 'Jane Eyre' was one of the happier Bronte novels, and the marriage at the end signifies Jane's actual desire to marry a man of her own accord, after a lot of soul-searching, and although it's moralistic at times it's genuinely cute to see her find happiness as well as a measure of independence. It's not as if the whole novel is about Jane being herself and the marriage is randomly tacked-on at the end; she has a lot of chemistry with Rochester and genuinely loves him, deciding on her own accord to take some time and think about whether marriage is the right choice.
In regards to the content in books of the time, there were a lot of extremely popular 'sensational' novels from the likes of Braddon and Collins - published a bit later than the work of the Brontes but nevertheless, proof that things didn't have to be squeaky-clean to be published.
Ruby tends to throw around random English lit textbook words to sound smarter, but her analysis is rarely above the surface-level stuff you get on Wikipedia. The best reviews are the ones that don't just rely on thesaurus abuse - they actually tell you something interesting about the reviewer's experience of reading the book.