'The Awakening' & 'Anna Karenina'

I've said this before, but Chopin gets Edna to the same place Tolstoy gets Anna in a 10th of the time.

Edna and Anna are merely two tiles in the great mosaic of morose women in literature. From Emma Bovary to the Little Women and all the heroines of Austin and the Bronte sisters, the legacy is deep and impactful.

As much as we could celebrate these great characters -- angry, disenfranchises, unsatisfied and sad -- the larger picture here is that women perhaps were not enslaved but the intentions were just the same.

Life prospects were slim, they were kept tethered to the idea that your worth was tied to whoever was married to you. That contentment was the ceiling, and shame and uncertainty were the bottom of the ocean.

Edna chose the bottom of the ocean. Anna, a train.

'The Count Of Monte Cristo'

I thought it interesting if not odd that in his film Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino wrote in a line about Alexandre Dumas being of African descent (his paternal grandmother was an African slave in the French colony of Haiti). Odd because the film is set pre-Civil War in the Southern United States and the line is provided to somewhat show that someone famous was black. The character King Schulz thinks Dumas would not think kindly to the institution (Dumas died in 1870 so he probably had thoughts about the subject), not because he’s a “soft-hearted Frenchy” but because of his ethnicity.

The point of the line, though, is that Django Unchained mirrors the revenge plot of Dumas’ most famous work The Count of Monte Cristo. Although he probably thought poorly of slavery, but was probably a supporter of Django as he exacted his revenge on white culture and those that had tortured him and his wife.

Dumas probably also supported the wife. He not only married but had at least 40 affairs and a number of illegitimate children. We can’t all be so noble.

'Little Women' & 'The Brothers Karamazov'

I've been the gravesite of Louisa May Alcott. At the time, I didn't appreciate her nearly as much as I do today. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. She is buried what is known as Authors' Ridge.

Alcott was an extraordinary woman. She learned under Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She not under learned under those scholars but she was raise by transcendentalists, which is a philosophical movement of the 1820s and 1830s in the northeast, which basically was a belief in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Alcott was an abolitionist, having worked on the Underground Railroad. She was a feminist and suffragist. All before the Civil War. She might also have been a lesbian. Although not unreasonable to go through life with no husband, she was briefly associated with a man once.

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body ... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man," Alcott said.

Little Women is essentially biographical. It is set in Masschusetts and mirrors that of her actual sisters and family. She created "Jo" in her reflection. She too had a younger sister die and felt the sting of separation and growth when her older sister got married.

Much is made of the relationships of brothers. The first story ever -- the book of Genesis -- is wrought with stories of brothers from Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. I don't think it's any mistake that all three stories are wrought with badness -- murder, betrayal and jealously.

Those stories are not alone as it continued throughout artistic creation including The Brothers Karamazov. It has a half percent of the sweetness of Little Women, but it does mirror the complications you find between brothers (and a father) compared to sisters. But often the feelings are the same. One thing you won't find in many brother stories is a strong adult female presence like the mother in Little Women. The mother is missing often in brother stories.

It's simple for either sisters or brothers. But if it was it'd make pretty boring literature.

'Dead Souls'

A clever novel by Nikolai Gogol, the Russian novelist, who set most of his stories post-Napoleon. This novel portrays a certain important stage in Russia's history -- an empire still stuck in serfdom.

This novel follows Chichikov, a middle-class shyster seeking to climb the ladder of land ownership. The only way he saw to acquire land was to roam the countryside buying up dead serfs, or dead souls.

The idea being is that the only way to acquire wealth -- or the facade of wealth -- is to collect serfs, dead or alive, which were essentially slaves, used by the landowners to farm their land.

The book is not so much about the actual deceased serfs but instead the grotesque land owners that Chichikov encounters in his voyage. The serfs are the lucky ones, they're not living monsters.

Chichikov winds up using the idea of owning all of these serfs as collateral to buying land. Dead serfs have the same value as live serfs, in mother Russia.

'The Idiot' & 'The Idiot'

I combined the two only because one (the book) inspired the title of the other (the record). I would like to think that Prince Myshkin resembled Iggy Pop from the album cover. 

Even if you aren’t an Iggy Pop fan, I couldn’t suggest The Idiot any more. It’s really a tremendously good David Bowie album. It is in fact the first of two albums that Bowie collaborated on with Pop and it was actually written and recorded before Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy of record.

Recorded in Berlin, there are distinct Kraut rock signatures. Also, with Bowie and long-time producer Tony Visconti at the helm, it’s an organized and adept rock album. None of the chaos of the Stooges.

The trio’s familiarity with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name led to the album title.

The novel itself is pretty grand. If you don’t like Russian literature, there’s no reason to really consider this. It’s as Russian as you might expect in that particular style that Dostoyevsky was able to perfect.

In searching for some kind of connection between the two pieces of art, it’s tough to come by. 

Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is about a young man’s disillusionment with upper-crust Russian society and its ills. There’s no real coherent narrative in Iggy Pop’s opus. So I guess it’s just a clever title for an album.  

'Walden, or Life in the Woods'

Henry David Thoreau leaves his home in Concord, Mass. in order to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

He moved to the woods around Walden Pond and built a cabin with his own hands. He lived there two years and observed the seasons, the animals and commented on literature, solitude, economy and more.

Thoreau was born in Concord to a middle-class family. He would later work in the family's pencil factory. He went to Harvard and studied everything from rhetoric to mathematics. He refused to pay a $5 fee and didn't receive his diploma.

Thoreau was a great and brilliant man, in my opinion. He was an abolitionist and the man behind civil disobedience, which would later inspire Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His influence transcended generations and would lead the country he loved into its greatest trial 100 years later.

He was one of the progenitors of Transcendentalism and one of the earliest environmentalists in the United States. After the Walden years, he dived deep into naturalism and botany. He became one of the first American supporters of Charles Darwin and his theories.

Thoreau's two years in the woods resulted in the manuscript, Walden, or Life in the Woods. Eight rewrites and 10 years later, it would be finally published.

It's a brilliant collection of essays. It shows America at its most solitary and self-reliant. It's beautiful in a lot of ways and inspiring in many more.

'The Return Of The Native'

I think one of the most interesting things to do is read books or poets or watch movies that are mentioned in other books and movies.

Knowing what characters in a fictional (or even nonfictional) like to read or watch is a really underrated way of getting to know that character. I mean, isn't that how we judge our friends and coworkers? Why shouldn't we judge Holden Caulfield the same way?

In The Catcher in the Rye, Caulfield, the novel's protagonist/whiner, lays down some literary criticism, free of charge:

"You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maughham, though. I read it last summer. It's a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know, he just isn't the kind of guy I'd want to call up, that's all. I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye."

I like that arguably the only reason that Holden Caulfield wants to talk to Thomas Hardy was because he created Eustacia Vye, the main protagonist of The Return of the Native, who winds up marrying Clym after leaving Wildeve. She becomes dissatisfied with Clym after he goes nearly blind and becomes a furze cutter. She winds up drowning herself.

Clearly, there's a common thread between Caulfield and Vye: Both are dissatisfied and looking for some sort of happiness that's eluding them and the people that could be providing that support and love (Sally Hayes, Mr. Antolini, Wildeve, Clym). In fact, these people are blatantly cast aside. Holden and Eustacia are just lost causes. Sinking ships. Of course, Holden liked Eustacia: They would have been brilliant self-destructive lovers.

Now, I really feel I need to read Of Human Bondage, just to see what Caulfield doesn't like.

'The Blithedale Romance'

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote some weird stuff.

The Blithedale Romance starts out as The Blithedale Bromance between Hollingsworth and Coverdale and then you begin to think that everyone's in love with Zenobia when in fact everyone's in love with Priscilla, Zenobia's half-sister. When left by Hollingsworth for Priscilla, Zenobia winds up drowning herself (see: Ophelia, the girl from Sansho the Bailiff).

I found Coverdale pretty obnoxious and egotistical in the first part of the story until you realize that everyone else is entirely more annoying and full of themselves. As it turns out, Coverdale is left on his own as he breaks up the relationship with Hollingsworth and the Zenobia is a flaky tramp.

Who I liked the most is the Fosters and Old Moodie. Also, I would have liked to read more about Blithedale and this commune action going on in the 1800s. People would just come to a farm to take advantage of the environment and hard work. Blithedale is based on Brooke Farm, a real life Transcendentalist commune in west Massachusetts that Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and others all frequented.

Eventually, it became a socialist farm: You put in the work, everyone shares the spoils and you get to dick around the rest of the time and talk about ghosts. Because, apparently, all anyone talked about in the 1800s was ghosts.

'King Solomon's Mines'

Some pieces of art need to placed in context. It makes a bit more poetic.

Consider that not only was travel abroad only for the insanely rich, slaves or those in the military or that a vast, vast amount of the planet had actually been fully explored, the idea of going abroad in a book, for a nickel or penny or however much books cost at the time, was probably the closest most people came from seeing the African plains, the jungles of Asia, the tombs of Egypt or the mystery of South America.

In 1885, when H. Rider Haggard started an entirely new genre of literature, the Lost World, with King Solomon's Mines, surprisingly, most of the world had been at least "found." Meaning, colonized. The Germans, Dutch, British and French had massive holdings in Africa, South America, North America and Asia. In fact, explorers had gotten bored and was looking for ways to getting to the poles and up the highest peaks.

Still, the interiors of these lands were still a mystery (think Joe Conrad and The Heart of Darkness). There's still parts of the Amazon river basin still unexplored. There's still allegedly parts of the Appalachian Mountains in the United State still unseen by outsider's eyes. The Valley of the Kings would be soon discovered in Egypt and the secrets of the Assyrian empire were being dug up. The rich culture and history of the colonized people around the world suddenly had a lot of depth and people wanted to know more. The sun might have rose and set on the British empire, but time started elsewhere.

Here you had Haggard bringing it all, based on real accounts, real people and somewhat real adventures (perplexing natives by taking out false teeth was a real trick played on the poor souls of Africa), all of which sparked an entire genre from H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Burroughs and all those crazy adventures novels that would follow. Let's face it, there's no Indiana Jones without Allan Quatermain.

'Jane Eyre'

I finished this book today. I finished it in my local Starbucks.

As I was ordering my drink, the cashier noticed my book and said that he'd started it months ago, but could never get into it. That Jane Eyre was on his reading list.

I told him it was unbelievably good, and I stand by this judgement. I have many preconceived and unfair notions of 19th century literature from female writers. I think Jane Austen is insanely overrated. Yet, Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte are different.

Jane's a different character. She's not some relatively well-off, misguided and quirky Victorian damsel, who always finds the right man that wholly understands her and will always take care of her. No, Jane is not like that all.

She's an orphan, who is verbally and emotionally abused and deprived by a loveless aunt. She's eventually cast off to a boarding school, where she is depressed and downtrodden. She survives a consumption outbreak and eventually learns the place of a student to become quite the scholar.

No, she's not saved from poverty. She becomes a governess for Mr. Rochester's ward, Adele. She does wind up falling with love with Mr. Rochester, but the wedding is stopped when it is learned that Rochester is already married. In fact, it's the crazy loon living in the attic (as if he really thought he'd get away this this?).

Eyre, however, is independent and doesn't take shit off anyone. She leaves, sans cash, belongings, and finds herself destitute and on her final leg before she happens upon her long-lost cousins.

Eyre is an independent woman only because she values education and scholarly pursuits and she's unafraid of hard work and finds no position too low for her, probably stemming from her position as an orphan.

All of this pays off in a way when she learns that her uncle died and left her some 20,000 pounds, which she graciously shares with her three cousins.

With the foundation of scholarly pursuit, goodness and hard work, she is able to support her cousins and, eventually, Rochester, who lost his eye sight and hand after a freak fire.

Eyre's a different breed because there's literally none like her in all of popular culture. The self-defining, independent woman. If she were born in 1966, Jane Eyre would have become an engineer or something.

'The House Of The Seven Gables'

First thing I had to do is find out what a "gable" is. Turns out, it's the triangle formed when two parts of the roof meet. I think.

Anyway, this house had seven of them. The house itself was modeled after the real House of the Seven Gables owned by Nathaniel Hawthorne's cousin. The real house was built in 1668 and had all seven gables. By the time Hawthorne rolled around, it had only three gables.

The book itself is about history, family, ghosts and redemption. Clearly, this is Hawthorne's comment on his own family and the very real Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Hawthorne's ancestors being huge parts of the Salem Witch Trials (where the real house is located) and he clearly had a lot of issues stemming from that.

It's part of the reason that The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter have similiar themes that look unremarkably upon judgement, religion and how the sins of the fathers affect the sons.

One theme I would like to address is the assumption that, in the story, a Pyncheon relative is actually "bewitched" by a member of the Maule family, which were victims of a faulty claim of witchcraft years before by a Pyncheon. This witchcraft resulted in the Pyncheon family member dying.

This is significant because as much as Hawthorne was attempting to make up for his family's past, he still made the innocent victim an actual witch.

I think that Hawthorne was actually pointing out that what is perceived as "witchcraft" is simple persuasion or the power of suggestion. It's the idea that witchcraft is not real, but it is "real" in the brains of the weak or those that want witchcraft to be "real."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

I'm willing to call Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the greatest American novel.
Published in the mid-1880s, it details the jaunt of Huckleberry Finn and the slave Jim down the Mississippi River during the antebellum days of the old South. For much of the narrative, Jim and Huck are mere players in someone else's arc, with Jim spending much of his time on the raft as Huckelberry finds himself on shore in the midst of a feud or pretending he's a girl.

Huck himself becomes a sort of a secondary character as the King and the Duke undertake their grifting ways from town to town, hoodwinking the trusting public.

The story is about freedom in a number of ways. Huck's opportunistic and freewheeling ways present America at its inception -- the land of pilgrims and frontiersmen. Huck is America, escaping his tryannical and drunk father to make his own way down the Mississippi River, the lazy river that starts in Minnesota and spits out in the Gulf of Mexico.

It also is a comment on racism and prejudice. Jim is a caring and loving character. Dumb, but he's not naive. He knows his place at that time. No one knows the score quite like Jim. Twice, Huck has the directly opportunity to lighten his load and turn Jim in, possibly for a reward. And twice he doesn't do it. This despite that Huck believes he's "sinning" by not turning in someon's slave, as if he were really taking off with someone's property.

Huck's attitudes on slavery and race isn't politically correct based on how we feel about things now. That would be ridiculous. Mark Twain in the 1880s would have had no concept of race in the 1980s or the 2000s. However, for the time, it was probably pretty radical.

Two, Huck's relationship and actions in regards to Jim have nothing to do with the color of one's skin, but it has everything to do with freedom. It's pure. Huck doesn't spare Jim's freedom nor do him and Tom Sawyer attempt to break Jim out from captivity because they think he's as equal no matter his skin color. Huck and Tom wouldn't understand our current views on race. It's not about African Americans or Asians or Middle Easterns or Hispanics. If a man is any kind of man, they would have their freedom. Freedom was everything. Not race.

'Around The World In Eighty Days'

I read Around the World in Eighty Days and I just want them to hop on an airplane and just shoot over to England and win the bet.

It's frustrating as a modern traveller to see Phileas Fogg and his crew be beholden to the rail system and boat schedules. These are problems that we now nothing about. Even our primitive forms of travel are better and a lot more reliable than the state-of-the-art accomodations of the latter part of the 19th century.

Going around the world in 80 days seems so elementary and easy. Even of you considered boats and trains. Seems like there was a bunch of sitting around. Even as they were moving, it was sitting -- on trains and boats. Yes, there's movement. However, there's an amount of idleness to sitting and waiting for a boat to cross an ocean.

Around the World in Eighty Days also chronicles a high point in the development of modern travel. Within one year, the transcontinental railroad in the United States and Suez Canal were opened. In addition, the railroads across India were connected.

The technology to travel was inconsequential. The steam engine and boat had already been put into wide use. However, without the foresight to provide the means to get across these countries was a gigantic step in flattening the world, if I can borrow Thomas Friedman's phrase. Of all the transports, the wind-propelled sled across the American plains was probably the most vital.

I was a bit disappointed in the ending. For Fogg to win the bet based on a coincidence (him asking Passepartout to fetch a priest for his marriage and learning it was Sunday) seems a bit cheap. All the while, Fogg meticulously and strategically circumnavigated the world in 80 days and the only reason he won was due to coincidence. Not even luck.

'Torrents Of Spring'

Ivan Turgenev published Torrents of Spring in 1872, just 11 year before he would pass away in 1883 having been a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It's significant because its considered at least partially autobiographical and it speaks to the frustrations of the female and love that Turgenev toiled under for this entire life.

Torrents of Spring revolves around that of Sanin, a young Russian landowner. Not too rich. Not too poor. He's staying in Frankfurt when he saves the life of a 14-year-old shopowner's son. At this time, he meets the boy's sister, the 16-year-old Gemma and falls madly in love. They eventually get engaged and in order to procure some money in order to get married, Sanin, by happenstance, runs into an old schoolmate, and decides to go to another city to sell his property in Russia to the schoolmate's wife.

Well, after much foreboding from Gemma, he leaves and immediately falls in love with the schoolmate's wife, they have an affair and he breaks off the engagement to follow this woman around.

The book ends with Sanin at the end of his wife and he looks up Gemma, who's moved to New York, gotten married, had children and led a generally good life.

Turgenev never married. He was born to a father who was a philanderer (when he was alive_ and a mother who was an abusive heiress. These characters really not unlike that of Sanin's schoolmate and his wife.

Much like Sanin living in Frankfurt, travelling in the West and learning the different languages, Turgenev, too, had an affinity to the West. He studied in Germany and England and lived for a time in Western Europe. This further strained his relations with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The former he had a duel with until Tolstoy called it off and apologized, not unlike the duel in Torrents of Spring.

In Torrents of Spring, we don't find a love-lost cad, but instead a writer, who didn't know how to handle women or was simply extremely unlucky and found himself in his twilight years in search of absolution.

'A Christmas Carol'

There are films, books, records and a lot more being printed, pressed, released and spread around the Internet that will never be seen by 99 percent of everyone.

There's countless others that'll be seen and forgotten. Good stuff that deserves a better fate, but it's all too much for even the most media-savvy jerks to take in.

However, more than 150 years after it was released, A Christmas Carol resounds over and over through the generations. The words "Bah!" and "Humbug!" are known. The denotations are clear and their source is well known. The moniker "Scrooge" is easily recognizable as someone rich, but stingy and unsociable and uncaring.

That kind of resonance is astounding. You couldn't buy that kind of importance or relevance. It just happens. It's lucky and amazing when it happens.

Charles Dickens means more today than he did in 1843 when he published the novella on Dec. 19. It sold 6,000 copies by Christmas Day. It was adapted for the stage almost immediately. All of this passed down through the ages in so many film and stage adaptations that it'd be dumb to count them all. It came to a head a year ago when Robert Zemeckis directed an animated version with Jim Carrey providing Scrooge's voice. It grossed $137 million.

That's relevance for you. It's almost the perfect story if it can still matter.

During its original publication in 1843, England had undergone a change in Christmas traditions harkening back to previous traditions like caroling.

By 1841, the German-born Prince Albert had introduced and popularized the Christmas tree in England. Two years later, Christmas cards took off. Following the publication of A Christmas Carol, the phrase "Merry Christmas" became popular.

Despite the ending of the story, A Christmas Carol is very dark. The imagery alone is frightening. Throw in the chained ghost of Marley, the ghosts, Scrooge seeing the grave markers of Tim and himself. It's a stark look into the mirror for not only the Scrooges of the world, but ourselves. It's a statement on the working conditions and the need to help the less fortunate. It's downright socialist.

I find it fascinating that it didn't take Scrooge very long to be convinced of the folly of his ways. In disbelief after Marley comes and goes, Scrooge is shaken. However, I think it's while the ghost of Christmas past is taking him through his long, forgotten scenes, Scrooge is already talking about making changes in his life. Yet, the ghosts still come. It was never over and never going to take until he saw the ultimate sacrifice to the way Scrooge was living.

Also, I don't quite remember Scrooge going to his nephew's house for dinner. I seem to recollect Scrooge and the Cratchits being the center of his change. Instead, there's an actual higher concentration on the relationship with his remaining family, the son of his beloved sister.

'Notes From Underground'

Important because its considered one first literary examples of existentialism, which is oh-so cheery.

Existentialism is kind of a bankrupt term for me because it means so much to so many people. People tend to equate the sole meaning of life depending solely on the individual. Somehow, that equation was at some point deemed pointless.

Why is that pointless? If it is so pointless, why write books or make films about how pointless it all is. That art makes the individual's life meaningful. It's all so very strange to me.

What separates Dostoyevsky from the general meaning of existentialism is that his "Man" is a miserable little asshole. If he were living in 2010, he'd be unkempt, covering high school football games for the local newspaper, blogging and playing World of Warcraft online. Still, he'd bitch about the etiquette of being a magical troll.

It doesn't make Notes From Underground bad, just misinterpreted on some level. If Dovstoyevsky put this on a blog, it'd be largely ignored. He writes Crime and Punishment and it somehow carries weight.

'Dracula'

I wonder what Bram Stoker would say if he knew and could fully comprehend what his book has done.

It's created a multi-billion dollar industry based on a mythical creature that doesn't exist and probably never did.

Without Stoker and his story, there's about six dozen fewer films. "Twilight" doesn't exist or is at least 95 percent less popular. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" doesn't exist and Alyson Hannigan's career is officially in jeopardy and Sarah Michelle Gellar's just another pretty face.

There's nothing in pop culture like the vampire myth. I've always thought that people in developed nations are entirely more prepared for alien or zombie invasion due to books and movies. No matter that either are practically out of the realm of reason.

Thanks to pop culture (and, thus, Stoker) we're entirely more able to identify and kill a vampire. I would bet most people don't know the origins of a werewolf, zombie, Frankenstein's monster, mummy or any other unreal horror character. But vampires are different.

Anyone's who has lived or breathed films knows exactly the ins and outs of being a vampire.

My other thought about vampires deals with supermarket tabloids. Stand in line in your local grocery store and you'll see a half dozen tabloid, celebrity magazines. There's another 10 headlines on each. Some seem out of this world. However, if you want to get at least the very minimum of truth, just read one of these tabloids. In each, there's a strain of truth, no matter how small.

Consider the vampire. With all the books, movies and allusions throughout the years, wouldn't it stand to reason that there's at least a tiny amount of truth to it?

Maybe there isn't a Dracula or vampires that are immortal and are fearful of religious items such as a crucifix and holy water.But at some point, there was a group or individual that gave this legend some truth or basis. All of this can't exist without it. I'm convinced.

'Wuthering Heights' & 'Wuthering Heights'

I've not read a book and the film version with such varying versions.

Basically, the film ends with Catherine dying. The same scene is the first third of the actual book.

I guess once the producers get the rights to do a film version they're at liberty to do pretty much whatever they please with it. No wonder J.D. Salinger didn't want to deal with movie rights.

It is shocking that director William Wyler read Emily Bronte's novel and decided to gut it, do about 1/3 of the total book and leave out a large, large chunk out of the film.

Developing the film's screenplay like they did and leaving out a large chunk of the book, it rewrites the characters quite a bit.

In the film, Catherine comes off like a total bitch going from Heathcliff to Linton and then never really giving up Heathcliff. I mean, give yourself to someone or no one.

In the book, with another 2/3 of the story in place, you learn what a sadistic piece of shit. In the film, he's a sympathetic character. In the book, he's an asshole and Catherine couldn't have played a smaller role.

'Pride and Prejudice'

I've never hidden my disdain for Jane Austen. There's the distinct possibility that my attitude toward the author is based on the fact that she's so regarded by people for the sole reason that she's a woman being successful during a day and age when women were used for baby making and social events.

Although this is true, I think it's more demeaning to rate her based on her ovaries rather than on her writing, which I don't think is all that great and her stories, is stinks of second-rate Shakespeare and romantic-comedy.

The most interesting theme in Austen's works is her treatment of the women in her stories. Most are well-educated and witty, not needing a man to justify their existence and yet they're emotional and wrought with a certain amount of conflict in their hearts as they battle what they feel and the societal constraints placed on them. The women think they're above love, marriage and whatnot, but they're just as much part of the machine as anyone else. Look at Elizabeth spurning the preacher man as if she holds some sway on her decisions and then going cuckoo over Darcy in a matter of days.

As if Austen is saying any inequality and lack of opportunity for women was as much the fault of the woman as it is the man. The woman that finally realizes that men are just penises will break the cycle.

'Tess of the d'Ubervilles'

In my senior level fiction writing class, my professor preached to us over and over about finding our own voice.

It's easy to say, but near impossible to actually define. Do you know when you've found your voice or does someone else tell you?

Thomas Hardy's formal education ended at age 16 due to his socio-economic standing. So he didn't have the opportunity to have a sandal-wearing college professor to tell him to find his own voice in his writing. He just wrote. Hardy probably never even thought about "voice" or "theme" but no writer of the last 200 years had such a singular and signature voice than Hardy.

If you read 10 books without knowing the author and three were Hardy, you could pick out the Hardy books easily.

It is interesting that Hardy lived until he was 87 and didn't write another novel for the final 25+ years of his life. It's also interesting that he died in 1928. His presence in this world isn't that far detached.