Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"

As a literary illiterate, I expected Jane Eyre to be the same kind of story as Jane Austen's. After all, it are all romantic novels from about the same period, no? It might be obvious for some of you, but they are not interchangeable at all. Where Austen realistically writes about society and people, Jane Eyre seems more to be some kind of a fairytale (but granted, a dark one).

To start with, Jane Eyre has everything against her. She's poor, she's an orphan child, her aunt and cousins treat her badly, she has to go to a terrible school, where the children are kept cold and hungry, there is an epidemic illness and her best friend dies,… How much more can you come up with? My feeling is that Charlotte Brontë is overdoing it a bit, which makes me lose touch with her heroine. The story seems a kind of a fairytale, where in the beginning everything is dark and bad, Jane Eyre has no chances on happiness at all in life, but in the end, all turns out (more or less) well. I've had to get used to this darkness.

What I precisely like so much in Jane Austen is her capacity to write fascinating stories about ordinary bright social life. Her heroines don't have all the luck in the world either: Catherine is rather poor, Anne is an ignored child,… but there is not one who has all the mischances of Jane Eyre. They are rather well off at the start of the story and better off in the end. The books focus much more on all the aspects of society.

But I suppose I just shouldn't read Charlotte Brontë with Jane Austen in the back of my head. After some while I got used to the style, and then it is a really good and well-written book. Compared to the books of Jane Austen (see, there I am doing it again ;-), it only seemed rather "girlish".

You can find the book here.

Sweet Thursday

There are so much pretty moments and small jewels in the world, which we so often don't pay attention to, immersed in our day-to-day activities. That's why I want to enumerate some of them each Thursday. Today we have:

• the smell of long dry grass on a warm day
• the sentences on the Yogi Tea bags. Today I had "You must step out of your house for learning."
• the colours of a butterfly
• a room lit by the soft light of burning candles
• banana milkshake

The lucerne experiment

Indian cress with lucerne mix?

As for the little lucerne experiment I did with the indian cress, I still cannot conclude if the lucerne mix makes plants grow better. In case you don't remember, I sowed indian cress in different pots, and added a lucerne mix, which is said to make plants grow better, to some and not to others, to see if it really make a difference.

As you can see on the pictures, the cress in the pots with red clothes-pin are definitely growing better than the ones without. So I wanted to conclude here that the lucerne mix really helps, when I saw that I noted done last week that in the three pots with red clothes-pin I left out the lucerne mix. And now I am wondering if I noted this done wrong, or the lucerne mix doesn't help at all... The only option seems to try it again another time!

Indian cress without lucerne mix?

The first plants

Small lettuce and a tiny radishes

In the past days, the small seeds I sowed have enjoyed the nice sunny weather as much as me and have been starting to grow tiny green plants out of the earth.

The lettuce is already forming a circle, and some radishes are starting to come out in the middle too. It's not my intention to let the lettuce grow out to crops, I am planning to cut it when about 10 centimeters, but I am only wondering if the radishes will have enough place to grow.

The sunflowers are also growing nicely. However small they still might be, you can already sense that in some time they will be strong enough to carry large flowers.

Future sunflowers