Coping with Jane Austen and Anne Brontë: It's all in the Shrubbery

Painting above: Le paysage (Brittany landscape) by Emily Carr, 1911

Coping tactics and ideas for self care have been everywhere lately. What ails us now (elections! pandemic! holidays approaching!) may be a a bit different from what our gals of old were stressing about, however, I have noticed a common coping technique in the writings of both Jane Austen and Anne Brontë.

I'm just about done reading Emma by Jane Austen for the first time (I really enjoyed Autumn de Wilde's recent adaptation) and there is a part near the end where our titular heroine needs a breather, so what does our gal do?:


"[...] she lost no time in hurrying into the shrubbery."

-from Emma by Jane Austen


In Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall things are perhaps a bit more serious (I won't specify what happens to avoid spoilers of course),  causing our heroine to do much the same:


"I flew to the shrubbery."

- from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë


If it's good enough for Austen and a Brontë, it's good enough for me! So next time you see me hitting the panic button, you'll find me taking some grounding breaths in the shrubbery.




Popular posts from this blog

9 Reasons Why Zack on Gilmore Girls is the Worst

Image
Of all the men in the Gilmore Girls world, I think Zack was the worst. Here's nine reasons why. I'm currently re-watching Gilmore girls for the umpteenth time, and once more I find myself loathing Zack in particular. Normally we all get caught up in Luke vs. Christopher, Dean vs. Jess vs. Logan, etc, but I think these debates distract viewers from realizing that Zack is the worst Significant Other of all the women in the show. I think the actor Todd Lowe does a great job portraying Zack, so my critique is def not his performance , my issue is the  character of Zack   who is sooo contemptible. In a way, Lowe's performance of Zack is all the more remarkable - when it comes to the Bad Men of Gilmore Girls, Zack rarely tops the list. I think it's because his many flaws are so *shrug* boys will be boys. As viewers I think we're meant to be distracted by the explosive incidents related to Logan's elitism, Mitchum's tyranny, Dean's cheating, Marty's obvio...
Read more

Omg She's Racist: A Closer Look at L.M. Montgomery's Work & Life

Image
They say to be critical of the media you love. I put this to the test with my undying love for L.M. Montgomery. In the past five-ish years, I have read and re-read many, many books by beloved Canadian author L.M. Montgomery (aka the woman who wrote the Anne of Green Gables series) including: Anne of Windy Poplars*  Anne’s House of Dreams*  Emily of New Moon  Emily Climbs Emily’s Quest  The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery 1889-1900 A Tangled Web  Pat of Silver Bush  Mistress Pat   Jane of Lantern Hill  Kilmeny of the Orchard  The Blue Castle I read/re-read the first three Anne books as a teen*. There are many things about Montgomery's (1874-1942) work that are significant and ground-breaking considering the era they were written in. Not to mention Montgomery herself being such a highly-successful author worldwide given she was both a woman and Canadian! Her work is unique and noteworthy for the followin...
Read more

Best of Helen Oyeyemi's "Peaces"

Image
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi. Painting above: The Lovers by Leonora Carrington (c.1987) You run the romantic gauntlet for decades without knowing who exactly it is you're giving and taking such a battering in order to reach. You run the gauntlet without knowing whether the person whose favour you seek will even be there once you somehow put that path strewn with sensory confetti and emotional gore behind you. And then, by some stroke of fortune the gauntlet concludes, the person does exist after all, and you become that perpetually astonished lover from so many of the songs you used to find endlessly disingenuous. p.5 If you stuck out your tongue it would dance there, right at the top: the fizz of conditionality. p.7 I'm sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning that flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good. p.16 And then there's the...
Read more