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AIBU?

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Original poster

AIBU to think classics are bloody hard to read?

353 replies

Blackbootswithredribbons · 18/10/2021 19:43

Now, don't get me wrong, I've read some amazing classics in my time (Lord Of The Flies, Jane Eyre etc) but it definitely hurts my brain sometimes! Amazing stories but the long, pointless descriptions, written in that old fashioned way that makes you feel a little stupid sometimes Blush.

So, AIBU?

OP posts:
Brefugee · 31/10/2021 20:02

yes

TomPinch · 31/10/2021 21:19

Thumbs up here for Wide Sargasso Sea.

Yep, very much about Bertha who was so wronged by her creator that I'm not surprised someone else wrote a book to redeem her.

(I wonder whether anyone has written a book in which St John Rivers goes off and starts a cult.)

Jane3212 · 30/09/2026 08:37

DottyHarmer · 20/10/2021 10:48

The heroine being oh so cool with homosexuality - yep, that would happen - not. And yes, her wandering all over Rotterdam or wherever unaccompanied and knowing where she was going when she’d never been out before - yep. Bilge.

I can’t bear modern sensibilities bolted onto the past. That is one reason why I don’t care for historical fiction. Of course, for example, there were gay people in Victorian times, but no one was out and proud! I think you can be very, very sure that most people would not even have known what it was.

My df had no idea that his own db was gay and that was in the 1940s. It wasn’t until at least the decriminalisation in the 60s that it was on people’s radar, and even until recently people would cover it up. (And some in public eye still do.) So the notion of Ru Paul’s drag race in 1850 is preposterous.

I know this is an old thread but I don't think this is accurate re most people not knowing what male homosexuality was until the 1960s.

'The Cleveland Street Scandal (1889) and the Oscar Wilde trials (1895) were massive media sensations. The intimate details were printed heavily in mainstream newspapers. By the 1930s and 40s, terms like "pansy" and "nancy boy" wer vernacular slang. Agatha Christie, for one, uses 'pansy' in a book and has several gay and lesbian characters. Nancy Mitford has the explicitly gay Cecil in Love In A Cold Climate. Many other examples..A Taste of Honey and Victim were films sympathetic to gay men and they came out early 60s, also.
A decade before the 1967 Act, the high-profile trial of Alan Turing (1952) and the subsequent Wolfenden Report (1957) triggered massive public and media debates about law reform. Figures like Tory MPs and John Gielgud were caught : it was hugely embarrassing for the establishment.

Many people did know, tacitly.

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