On Facebook not too long ago I asked whether I should read Anna Karenina. I am not, I repeat not, a romantic. Most people would think that I am. Look at the name of my blog. I like a cottage garden and I like Adele. However, I am an introvert and a thinker. I like Jane Austen because she is satirical and made fun of the conventions of modern society. I do not believe in “soul mates”. In fact believing that another person can fulfill your dreams is to me insanity. I am the mistress of my destiny and definitely not in need of a man to make my life complete! (I will write later about my women’s rights tendencies).
So why did I start to write this? Oh yes, it was to say that I finally picked a book to start reading and I made the right choice! I am reading “The White Garden” by Stephanie Barron. Stephanie is the author of the Jane Austen Mystery series and an historian. She is an excellent writer. In addition, she wrote “The Flaw in the Blood”. I purchased “The White Garden” after a failed attempt at reading “Mrs. Dalloway”, written by Virginia Woolf. I find that I often have problems with celebrated novelists. That makes me feel unworthy and somehow like trailer trash. More often than not, I prefer easy reading. So I often remind myself that I really am not that smart if I prefer to read all of Alexander McCall Smith’s books but cannot slog my way through “Mrs. Dalloway”.
Only pages into “The White Garden” and I am entranced. Okay, it is a little hokey that she uses the term, “she is a gardener” at least three times. However, by page 11 there is talk that Vita Sackville-West wrote about “what was most intensely intimate, including sex.” And there is nothing that I like more than a book about gardening and sex!
When I was dating my husband, we had a very stimulating discussion about plant sex. Okay, you’re going to think I am virginal and prudish, but it’s true. It is surprising in our day and age that skirting the subject of sex is actually more titillating than discussing it openly. And I do find that like Vita, “the act of plunging her hands into dirt and making things bloom had been as intimate as sex…” There is passion in the garden!
And so I will continue next time.
What would Jane Austen Grow? 