Eugene O’Neill died on 27 November 1953. He was sixty-five. Here he is, as a wee laddie…
Eugene O’Neill as a Child
Too adorable!
“Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.”
Reading Suggestions: Bound East for Cardiff; The Long Voyage Home; Beyond the Horizon; Anna Christie; Desire Under the Elms; Strange Interlude; Mourning Becomes Electra; Ah, Wilderness!; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey Into Night; A Moon for the Misbegotten
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Portrait of Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866
REASON: When snow started falling today, my mind immediately turned to Christina Rossetti. Her words, no matter how passionate, are of the winter.
“And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.”
If you missed My Top Six Cold Weather Writers, go here.
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”-F. Scott Fitzgerald
George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819.
George Eliot
George Eliot was rebellious in ways that actually meant something. She had guts, too, and a wide talent.
“The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.”-George Eliot
Novels: Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner; Romola; Felix Holt, the Radical; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda
Cold weather never travels alone. It packs many well-loved delights in its frosty bag of tricks, including: hot chocolate, gingerbread, nifty patterned gloves and scarves, pumpkin-flavored everything, frozen breath, crackling wood fires, mulled beverages, and fairy lights. Whilst those are wonderful there are other, lesser extolled, pleasures in which to indulge: mint chocolate brownies, hot water bottle cozies, the scent of real pine, watching snow fall at midnight, and seasonal reading. Oh, seasonal reading! How I adore thee.
Yearly I turn to you, as the calendar begins its long hike through winter’s desolate days…
I seek you out to warm my cold soul and chapped heart…
You do things to me that hot drinks and heavy blankets never could…
What a comfort you are, my winter writers!
There is but one solution when faced with the inevitable onslaught of nasty, chilling weather: arm yourself to the teeth with a weighty supply of wonderful books, and dig in for the duration. As soon as temperatures sink, an instinctual survival mode kicks in and I start to ritualize my life-including a long-standing pattern of reading works by the same authors. The books themselves vary, of course, but their progenitors remain fixed. This time of year my preferences tend towards the following qualities of language, attitude, or thought: severity, hardiness, bareness, intellectual passion, bluntness, pluckiness, and mental or emotional resilience.
Do you read in such seasonal ways? If so, please share your favourite cold weather books and/or writers in the comments! Here is my list.
MY TOP SIX COLD WEATHER WRITERS
EMILY BRONTË
Emily Brontë by Branwell Brontë
REASON: Her solitary, willful disposition.
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.”
ANTON CHEKHOV
Anton Chekhov, 1889
REASON: No one speaks to my deepest soul the way nineteenth-century Russian writers do, Chekhov chief amongst them.
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson
REASON: The economy of her writing.
“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.” Continue reading
Doris Lessing Quote
Marcel Proust died on 18 November 1922.
Marcel Proust
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning author, has died at 94 [COURTESY LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOKS]
A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 