I also like NORTH AND SOUTH’s Mr. Rochester effect, which is that the powerful, passionate man clearly meant to be Margaret’s mate, must be brought down from his arrogant high horse before the match can be made. Gaskell doesn’t blind her Mr. Thornton as her friend Charlotte Brontë did to her Mr. Rochester, but Gaskell does put him in dire financial straits, and then (take that, Mr. Captain of Industry!) she allows Margaret to inherit just enough wealth to help him. Only then can they meet as equals in marriage.

There’s one wonderfully melodramatic but vivid scene when Margaret challenges Thornton to go face the crowd of angry strikers in person, and then, when the crowd gets nasty, she goes herself and stands between him and them. In fact, in her desire to protect him, she throws her arms around his neck. Thornton’s reaction (this part feels so right) is actually physical pleasure and a conviction that the young woman obviously is in love with him if she would embrace him in public. He then fantasizes about her touch for weeks– it’s pretty hot stuff for the nineteenth century and a novelist who is a pastor’s wife.

Somewhat less satisfying, but not bad, is her portrait of a “good” union man, Nicholas Higgins, who teaches Thornton a few things, but also has to learn a few. Thornton, who is in fact a former worker who really did accumulate his own capital, sits down with Higgins, and they come up with some ways of working together. It rejects the all-worker union, but at least gives the privilege to a kind of mutuality.

One note about an element of all Mrs. Gaskell’s work that 21st century readers may mistake for melodrama is how characters drop like flies– they die of consumption, of apoplexy, of heart disease and some unnamed female complaint, probably a cancer– but to Gaskell’s mind, death of people in their fifties and sixties is perfectly normal, as is consumption taking a girl of nineteen or twenty. Think, in fact, of the Brontë siblings: two dead of Tuberculosis before 30, the brother of alcoholism (probably) even earlier, and Charlotte while pregnant at the age of 38.

This is the strength and weakness of fast publishing– of all the writers who have an audience calling for their work–they are encouraged, for financial and ego reasons to publish fast.  There is a wonderful energy and exchange with the audience in this (think of Dickens with people writing to beg him to keep a favorite character alive, or today of George R.R. Martin with people howling for the final book of his “Fire and Ice” series to be published already), but also some contorted developments and sloppy writing.

All this to say I read Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South on the Kindle, a free download via the computer from Gutenberg, I think  (I’m not remembering now which books I got from the Kindle store and which ones from Gutenberg Project directly).  Loved the book, and intend to write about it in my review newsletter, but it was truly right on the Kindle:  no need to go back and forth, a simple style  with not a lot to underline and admire– all story all the time.  I’m sorry it’s done.

I finished the final Palliser novel (The Duke’s Children), which was surprisingly cheerful after the heavily dysfunctional relationships of The Prime Minister.   The Duke’s heir Silverbridge  (“Silver”) grows on you:  not overwhelmingly smart, with no real political convictions, making one error in life after another, but lovable and good hearted and once he was in love willing to stick to it!  His sister also sticks to her choice in a love, and there’s another of Trollope’s pathetic woman of power, Mabel Glax, tramelled  by sexism, the class system, and the disaster of turning great gifts to love alone.

It isn’t that I’m not reading contemporary books:  I’m working on a new issue of my newsletter with one unpublished book and a couple from a couple of years ago.  But the fact is, the brand new books are expensive and harder to get on the e-readers.  Let me rephrase, not harder to get, but harder to get free.  I have this feeling I should be able to borrow, as in the library, and there seems to be some of that developing– Amazon has some books you can borrow for two weeks, if the owners allow  (I think I’m getting this right) but they can only be borrowed once.  There’s something all wrong about this– I’m still having trouble with the ethics of all this and the logistics.  The ethics of copyright is fascinating and annoying:  I just read somewhere that the entire twentieth century’s output of  books– at least after 1920–  is going to be dead to e-books unless the publishers and authors get their heads straight and give up the infinite copyrights.  Easy for me to say, with how little I make in royalties.

“The Lifted Veil” is a kind of Henry James-in-his-supernatural mode story with a touch of Poe, very overwrought and with a totally bizarre medical experiment in the end that causes a corpse to Tell All– still, there were parts that completely gripped me, the strnage passive narrator who sees too much and is involved in a truly rotten marriage– which I’m beginning to think is the great  Victorian subject– being caught in a relationship with the wrong person and being unable to get out of it.

I’m reading a little in Haight’s bio of her, too, the parts I didn’t pay much attention to like her first time alone, in Geneva, in pensiones, a thirty year old mademoiselle, not beautiful (even the drawings of her barely manage to flatter– the big hooter, the half-blind eyes, the pendulous lower lip).  Thank God for George Lewes making her happy and thus Middlemarch and The Mill and Adam and Daniel and Gwendolyn and all the rest.

“Brother Jacob” is a  parable, unpleasant family thief found out by his enormous pitchfork toting retarded brother.

I  LOVE getting these free and reading them in the calm gray linear environment of the Kindle.

Once I got used to it, I liked it a lot.  Here are some initial observations:

The lightness of the device (when it isn’t wearing its new protective cover), is amazing and much better for reading in bed than any book I’ve read since comix.

Something about the format, the relatively small screen, which is highly readable, changes my reading style with the intense focus on the present paragraphs.  I find it hard to skim and modulate my speed, which I apparently never realized I did so much of.  Since I will also be reading hard copy books, as well as the Kindle, I hope this simply turns into another way of reading, an addition to my reading repertoire.

What does look likely, and as I planned, is that I will gradually get all the free Victorian novels onto the Kindle and always travel with Geo. Eliot, Jane Austen, Uncle Tony, Charles Dickens, and all the rest of them.  I’m not so sure about the Great Russians because of the issue of translations– the best translations are probably not going to be free.  Do I really want Constance Garnett’s Tolstoy?  Maybe I do.  Anyhow, what I’m likely to carry with me is going to be out-of-copyright English language novels.

I haven’t tried poetry yet.

I haven’t bought a book  for money yet.  I was going to try the last of the Fire and Ice George R.R. Martin sword and sorcery books, but had already ordered a cheap used copy– a giant hard back.  Too bad.  I might still shell out six dollars to try it on the Kindle.

I’m not satisfied with how some of the books for Kindle look that are from sources other than the Amazon store (including the Smashwords books ): they have a double space between paragraphs, a combination of business letter and conventional narrative paragraphing that irritates me because it denies us novelists another means of expression– the double space.

More anon.

Bottom line is that I liked it and thought it would be perfect e-reader reading– the book copy we have is already a book club edition with cheap paper, fragile and brittle, developing tiny tears.  Who needs this kind of physical object?  Better to have the flow of the story electronically?

Lulu, by the way,  is a good free-upload publishing place– they produce books for e-downloads or print or photo books, or just about anything– great example of putting the means of production in the writers’ hands,  with the question arising next, how to get the products in the hands of  readers.

This may come close to sucking me in.  She and I were talking about this last week, about when we were likely to make the move to purchasing an e-reader.  We agreed we were waiting for the prices to come down, and I said I was leaning toward maybe asking my husband and son to go in together to get me a reader  next holiday season, and furthermore that I’d been leaning toward a Sony because it is easier to get the free stuff off the web from Gutenberg and the rest.  I described my dream of walking around with all of George Eliot!  the entire works of Dickens! Trollope’s Palliser novels– all all ALL of them!  in my arms!  It is just mind boggling.

All of  the things that are problematic about technology sort of slide away as I imagine hugging all the Victorian novels at once to my bosom.  Well, read about the British library’s pride in how they are plunging into the future here.