The leaves are yellowing, the air is cooling, and the pumpkin is spicing. Fall is here. Is there anything better this time of year than wrapping myself in a blanket, sipping a hot beverage, and cozying up with a good book? I think not. As an avid reader, I always have a book on me—not counting the hundreds of ebooks in my Kindle app. My favorite part about being an English major has to be all the different books and authors I’m exposed to and books I wouldn’t have picked up on a shelf or chosen for myself otherwise.
Throughout my college career, I’ve read different novels and short stories from dozens of authors in dozens of genres. As a reader, I love seeing the different ways stories unfold: do we get flashbacks? Do we get multiple POVs? Can we predict what happens next or will be dumbfounded by the choices the characters make? As a writer, I absolutely live for the different choices authors make—and getting to the ending and realizing how everything falls together is just chef’s kiss— and the way prose and formats change over time.
Currently, I am reading A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe (1790), for my Romantic Literature class (as in, literature from the Romantic period, not genre). The first thing that struck me from this novel was the format. For starters, paragraphs are giant, as in, take-up-a-page-and-a-half giant; there aren’t any breaks for dialogue or setting changes, which is a must in modern literature. Secondly, the sentence structure is a compound-complex, which means they’re long-winded with multiple clauses and have so many commas, dashes, and semicolons. Thirdly, and most noticeably, the narrative is completely different. Unlike modern-day novels, like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue or All The Light We Cannot See, which bring the reader into the scene, Radcliffe tells us everything as the characters experience it, she gives us context, what they’re feeling, all without bridging the gap between reader and narrator. It’s as if someone’s telling you the story rather than reading it.
Ever since I opened the first page, I’ve been hit with the realization that the book in my hands was written by someone more than 200 years ago. Beyond the novel itself, beyond the story and the message, the fact of the matter is that the words on the page came from someone whose life was so different from mine, whose experiences and hopes and dreams differ from mine in ways I can’t even begin to imagine, and yet, I hold her words in my hand.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read a centuries-old novel. In high school, I read The Odyssey and Don Quixote, both of which are much older than A Sicilian Romance, and last year I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time. But this is the first time I’ve really considered how long the stories have existed. How many shelves have these books been on before reaching mine?
Books, I’ve always believed, are mirrors that reflect our society: our beliefs, our political landscape, our desires, everything. So to pick up a book from 1790 is to catch a glimpse into their world. How strange it is to share an experience with someone from the late 18th century? How strange it is to share the excitement and shock of the twists and turns this novel takes? How strange it truly is to imagine that perhaps my words, my novels, will be read and enjoyed by someone two hundred years from now?