Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The characters

There were so many real-life figures who made cameo appearances in the book. Since you did some research on these, were there any that were particularly notable or interesting?
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1 comment:

kc said...

Toward the end his friend Edmund Gosse, whom I had never heard of, is talking about his book "Father and Son." I found that pretty intriguing. I looked it up, and apparently it's a very highly esteemed memoir. This blurb from Wikipedia made me want to read it: "Brilliantly written, and full of gentle wit," the book is "an unmatched social document, preserving for us whole the experience of childhood in a Protestant sect in the Victorian period....Above all, it is one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured...a religious upbringing."

The Oscar Wilde stuff was interesting to me too. I think of Wilde and James as kind of the height of civilization, two men with elegant manners and taste, and yet they didn't like each other. Wilde has that quote about putting all his art into his life (and thereby having a dazzling life, while it lasted, but short-changing his work and not reaching the potential of his genius). James seems to have the opposite problem of having put all his life into his art.

One can almost hear Wilde telling James, “You should be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

12:09 PM, March 28, 2012

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