Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teasers:

from Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor:

"At the beginning of March there were a few still, sunny days; for the month, as usual, came in like a lamb and would, no doubt, go out like a lion.

There were other signs of spring -- mauve crocuses out in the gardens (the starlings had shredded the yellow ones to pieces), and a faint haze of buds on some trees."  (chapter 8, page 68)

from Villette by Charlotte Bronte:

"Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world.  Unaccountably, perhaps, and close upon some space of unusually frequent intercourse -- come congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of communication -- there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion."  (chapter 24, page 308)

from The Madwoman in the Attic (2nd edition) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar:

"Villette is in many ways Charlotte Bronte's most overtly and despairingly feminist novel.  The Professor and Shirley, as we have seen, at least pretended to have other intentions, disguising their powerful preoccupations with the anxieties of femaleness behind cool, pseudo-masculine facades; and Jane Eyre, though rebelliously feminist in its implications, used a sort of fairy tale structure to enable the novelist to conceal even from herself her deepening pessimism about woman's place in man's society.  (chapter 12, page 399)