It’s prime reading weather — long nights, cold days — and I recently bought an e-book to keep me company: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die (Volume 1). How could I resist 50 classics for two dollars?

True, I’ve already read many of them. I was an English major, after all. But I doubt I would have started The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte had it not landed on (in?) my electronic nightstand. It’s an epistolary novel, a tale told entirely in letters and journals, and a reminder of how life was lived in an earlier, calmer and difficult-to-be-anything-but-landed-white-male-gentry time.

Though I can’t say Anne has become my favorite Bronte — it would be hard to dethrone Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) — her novel grew on me, and by the end I couldn’t put it down, so thoroughly was I rooting for Helen and Gilbert to marry and find happiness. No spoiler alerts here; you’ll have to read it yourself to find out. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)