Why do you like this author so very much?

I got the book and studied it.

And what did I find?

An accurate, daguerre-typed portrait of a commonplace face,

a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers.

But no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy.

No open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no

Bonnie Beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but

confined houses. That was Charlotte Bronte, author of Jane Eyre, writing about our next selection.

Her correspondent was G.H. Lewis, a respected literary

critic, who replied that Bronte must learn to acknowledge this author as one of the greatest

artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest

sense of a means to an end that ever lived.

But here's Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, on the same subject.

Every time I read this book, I want to dig the author up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.

But here's Winston Churchill, England's Prime Minister during World War II, writing about the same book. What calm lives they had those people.

No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars? Only manners

controlling natural passion so far as they could,

together with cultured explanations of any mischances.

Our next book is loved by millions all over the world, and hated by some.

Where Will You Fall?

Storytime for grownups returns Monday, September 9th, when we'll be reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

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