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"Reader, I married him".

110 replies

ChinBristles · 22/07/2022 19:47

I hate this and variations thereof! You are not Jane Austen.
I see it too often on here and in certain tabloids which we all read even if we don't admit it.

OP posts:
newhere989 · 23/07/2022 13:39

@BunnyChowLover that is so cute 🥰

MadamOracle · 23/07/2022 13:42

I quite like it.

Granted, it has to possibly it be a bit twee, even smug. But it’s usually posted by MNs who are genuinely in love with their husbands. And that makes me smile.

ThomasinaGallico · 23/07/2022 13:48

The ‘it was all a dream’ trope was last used convincingly by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass. A great read but I didn’t think it was really a children’s book and Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a problematic character.

HarkAVagrant · 23/07/2022 13:52

riotlady · 23/07/2022 13:23

made me think of this comic!

I broke out an old user name to say I love Hark a Vagrant!
Reader I married him doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as people who write “x, wherefore art thou x” and don’t understand what wherefore means.

DorritLittle · 23/07/2022 14:07

riotlady · 23/07/2022 13:23

made me think of this comic!

Love the comic 😀

We'll have to disagree about that Blossoms. It has a definite story arc, climax points and resolution for me. This link explains it. I get it isn't everyone's cup of tea though. And the men are mostly completely awful. I'd personally go for Edgar these days... and Jane Eyre is certainly wiser than Cathy!

www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/book-storystructure/wuthering-heights/

DorritLittle · 23/07/2022 14:07

riotlady · 23/07/2022 13:23

made me think of this comic!

Love the comic 😀

We'll have to disagree about that Blossoms. It has a definite story arc, climax points and resolution for me. This link explains it. I get it isn't everyone's cup of tea though. And the men are mostly completely awful. I'd personally go for Edgar these days... and Jane Eyre is certainly wiser than Cathy!

www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/book-storystructure/wuthering-heights/

DorritLittle · 23/07/2022 14:08

sorry to post twice!

MarieIVanArkleStinks · 23/07/2022 14:30

Interestingly enough Charlotte Brontë didn't seem to think much of Austen. She wrote to George Lewes words to the effect that she found her books to be like a 'carefully fenced, finely cultivated garden ... no trace of a bright or vivid physiognomy'.

I prefer Villette to Jane Eyre: Lucy Snowe is a more interesting and enigmatic protagonist who narrates her story on her own terms, omitting what she doesn't want to tell. She also achieves true independence - even though like Jane she also falls for a misogynistic, highly dubious love interest. Emily's 'Wuthering Heights' and Anne's 'Tenant' are startlingly violent books, even for the period. IMO WH is marred by the saccharine, Christian sentiment of redemption through the next generation, but 'Tenant' is an incredible piece of writing and I think Anne is sorely undersung.

There's just something endlessly fascinating about the Brontës, not only related to their biography and the tough life they led but to the sheer power, rawness and passion of their writing.

Agree with OP that I'm embarrassed for anyone who addresses a statement to 'Reader, blah blah'. It's as condescending as it's now hackneyed.

ErrolTheDragon · 23/07/2022 14:30

Queenoftheashes · 22/07/2022 22:30

I prefer the first sentence of Jane Eyre; it’s more relatable I think.

“Reader, I married him” is overused but less annoying than attributing it to Jane Austen

I was going to make a comment relating to this but the forecast was better than expected and I did 9km.

Heresince2006 · 23/07/2022 14:33

HarrietSchulenberg · 22/07/2022 22:14

For those still wondering, it's from Jane Eyre and the "one of the various Brontes" who wrote it was Charlotte. If you haven't already read it, do - it's not remotely soppy and is a truly great book.

It's a terrible novel - navel-gazing tripe, with a dollop of superstition to boot. If Jane Eyre were on MN, she'd be banging on about her spidey senses and asking if she WBU to marry an abusive man considerably older than she is, who has been keeping his wife locked in the attic.

It really is shite.

ErrolTheDragon · 23/07/2022 14:38

I prefer Villette to Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the first 'proper' book I ever read - I think at the same time as the serialisation with Michael Jayston and Sorcha Cusack - so it's hard not to simply love it the most. But Villette is very good... except the ending. WTF?? Mind you, the very end of JE is a bit ConfusedHmm

Rainbowshit · 23/07/2022 14:39

I like it.

shadypines · 23/07/2022 15:07

CuriousCatfish , god forbid Charlotte Brontë thought to herself 'mmm I've written a pretty decent story here and summarised it quite well in that line'. The blazen cheek of it! Much better if she'd chucked the manuscript in the fire shouting 'go to the deuce you worthless pile of scribbled random words...'

MurderAtTheBeautyPageant · 23/07/2022 15:10

If Jane Eyre were on MN, she'd be banging on about her spidey senses and asking if she WBU to marry an abusive man considerably older than she is, who has been keeping his wife locked in the attic.

The world of fiction would be pretty dull if all our protagonists chose a nice sensible spouse.

Queenoftheashes · 23/07/2022 15:20

ErrolTheDragon · 23/07/2022 14:30

I was going to make a comment relating to this but the forecast was better than expected and I did 9km.

Very good… ugh I need to stop pretending I’m reading and just go out it’s not even raining

Sux2buthen · 23/07/2022 15:20

It's one of the most annoying things on here, it disappeared for a while but it's creeping back in

BlossomsOnATree · 23/07/2022 15:30

That cartoon is brilliant Grin

DorritLittle That has helped me see the arc in terms of it being Heathcliff's story. I think I tend to see it from the POV of the female hero/es and that's why I find it frustrating. Prob also why I like Jane Eyre more. But what I really love about Jane Eyre is the dichotomy between what Jane wants and achieves, and what Charlotte is showing us about women/men/feminism through Bertha, Adele, Grace Poole, Blanche and Jane's own story without Jane seeing it herself (how much Charlotte herself sees it, I'm not sure).

It we're talking masterpieces though, Frankenstein.

BlossomsOnATree · 23/07/2022 15:38

To go back to "Reader, I married him" - I think it's a moment loaded with compromise where the novel collapses into a "happy" ending after all the doubt-raising, misogyny and horror that's gone before. To me it reads like a challenge to the reader where you're invited to go along with her to the seemingly anti-feminist ending, but you feel a sense of deflation, worry or nagging doubt. It's only finally OK because he's been weakened, she's rich and she can control him, to become the little wifey.

I'm reminded of that ambiguous bunch of thoughts every time I see someone use the phrase so it always seems a bit concerning!

JaneJeffer · 23/07/2022 17:38

Wuthering Heights is miles better than Jane Eyre.

HavfrueDenizKisi · 23/07/2022 18:06

The very fact that you said it was Jane Austen and had to hobble on to partially correct yourself means I can discard your view.

SpongeBobJudgeyPants · 23/07/2022 18:13

Queenoftheashes · 22/07/2022 22:30

I prefer the first sentence of Jane Eyre; it’s more relatable I think.

“Reader, I married him” is overused but less annoying than attributing it to Jane Austen

This. Grin

Redglitter · 23/07/2022 18:15

I just hate seeing the variations of it on threads here.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 23/07/2022 18:31

Heresince2006 · 23/07/2022 14:33

It's a terrible novel - navel-gazing tripe, with a dollop of superstition to boot. If Jane Eyre were on MN, she'd be banging on about her spidey senses and asking if she WBU to marry an abusive man considerably older than she is, who has been keeping his wife locked in the attic.

It really is shite.

Can't agree about that. I read it first as an impressionable 14yo when our English teacher made it the set text one term. I've re-read it several times since, in the succeeding decades. The last time, a few years ago now, I found the first part, covering Jane's childhood, by far the best part.

Everyone criticising Mr Rochester for keeping his mad wife in the attic needs to remember that the alternative was paying for her to be kept in a private asylum, as shown in The Woman in White. There were no effective treatments for mental health problems back then, especially schizophrenia, and madness wasn't grounds for divorce. We can hypothesise all we like about why Bertha Rochester, nee Mason, was considered mad, and I for one find it very difficult to get Wide Sargasso Sea out of my mind here, but we have no idea what Charlotte Bronte had in mind as the diagnosis (if any). There was huge stigma around mental illness and it can't have been uncommon for families to attempt to hush it up.

(Obviously trying to make a bigamous marriage was a bad idea, but that's a separate thing from nursing the first wife at home.)

A real life parallel from the 19th century: William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, and his wife Isabella had three daughters in three years. The middle child died at 8 months old. His wife became suicidal shortly after the birth of the third baby. She was given all sorts of treatments but never recovered, although she outlived him by 30 years. We can speculate that she had post-natal depression, or puerperal psychosis, or a very natural depressive reaction to her baby's death, but whatever it was, it was incurable back then, and professional advice was that she would never return to a normal mental state where it would be safe for her to live with her family. Sad Thackeray paid for the best care for her he could afford for the rest of his life and was unable to divorce and re-marry. He appears to have been a very decent man, a devoted father and philosophical about the turn his life had taken. He had been something of a dilettante when younger, but once faced with the responsibility of paying for his wife's care and the cost of running a household for himself and his two little girls, he worked like a demon and became very successful.

Heresince2006 · 23/07/2022 18:39

JaneJeffer · 23/07/2022 17:38

Wuthering Heights is miles better than Jane Eyre.

It's even worse.

Thomas Hardy is brilliant, though.

(And your little paragraph about Thackeray was fascinating, @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g - thank you!)

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 23/07/2022 18:51

Heresince2006 · 23/07/2022 18:39

It's even worse.

Thomas Hardy is brilliant, though.

(And your little paragraph about Thackeray was fascinating, @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g - thank you!)

It's a pleasure, @Heresince2006! I read a biography of his eldest daughter, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, years ago. Fascinating stuff. She knew everybody who was anybody in later 19th and early 20th century literary London. Her younger sister Minny was married to Leslie Stephen, but sadly died (sounds like eclampsia) while her only surviving child Laura was very young. Laura had been very premature and had what we would now call learning disabilities, so ended up in an asylum. After Minna's death Stephen married again and by his second marriage had two daughters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Anne saw a lot of them, but I doubt she ever saw very much of her own niece Laura, sadly.

What a long we've come in the succeeding century or two.

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