Book Girl

by Sarah Clarkson

  My reaction was outrage—a grieved sense of betrayal, compounded by the drama and shifting identity of my teenage years. I was hopeless on that stormy night, and my faith felt very frail as I reached for my current book, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was distraction I was after, but ah, it was a challenge I found as I was swept into a story about dark lords; evil powers intent on destruction; and the good elves, the wise wizards, the small but courageous hobbits who give the whole of themselves to fight for beauty and health and kindness. I stumbled across Frodo’s grieved wish that such things “need not have happened in my time” and nearly wept in agreement. But I was also gripped and almost mercilessly challenged by Gandalf’s gentle rebuke that such wishes are not in our gift; rather, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

  The words seemed to be aimed directly at me, confronting my undisciplined bitterness so that I felt myself begin to wonder, What must I do with the time given to me? In that moment, with Gandalf’s challenge ringing in my imagination, I encountered the reality that a girl who reads is a girl who understands that she has a part to play in the drama of the world. A woman who reads is a woman who knows she must act: in courage, in creativity, in kindness, and often in defiance of the darkness around her. She understands that life itself is a story and that she has the power to shape her corner of the drama. She has learned, with Frodo, that reluctant but faithful hero, that the heroes in the best stories are simply the ones who “had lots of chances . . . of turning back” but didn’t. To know yourself as an agent in the story of the world, one able to bring light and goodness in the midst of suffering, is a profoundly empowering knowledge, one that I believe comes to every woman who reads.

  My teenage encounter with The Lord of the Rings was a turning point in my idea of myself and my faith because that story helped me to perceive the epic narrative of Scripture, the real divine drama by which my own life was defined. It helped me to contextualize my suffering within a larger story, to realize that bitterness was something I must fight, that hopelessness was something I had to resist. I remember wishing one day that real life were more like The Lord of the Rings, that I had a clear part to play. But even as the thought crossed my mind, I began to realize that if Tolkien created Middle-earth and God created Tolkien, then God’s story must be far better, far more epic even than the great and beautiful dramas of Middle-earth. That fantasy novel paradoxically helped me to reengage with Scripture, to see it for the divine drama it is, one with a beauty beyond even the elves’ imagining, and a call to the brave beyond even Aragorn’s echoing challenge. Tolkien’s story helped me to recognize Scripture as my story, the one in whose decisive battles I was caught, the narrative that drew me into the conflict, requiring me to decide what part I would play: heroine, coward, lover, or villain.

  I count my adult embrace of faith from the day I finished The Lord of the Rings on a humid summer morning, in the drafty garage-apartment that was now my room after the dreaded cross-country move. I sat with Tolkien’s book open on one side, my Bible on the other, and on the pages of both, words that brought me to a crisis of decision. In The Fellowship of the Ring, I had read about Frodo’s choice to accept a great burden and enter the battle:

  A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo’s side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice.

  “I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”

  And in my Bible, I read this:

  This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.

  DEUTERONOMY 30:19-20

  The choice was clear. I simply said yes—to believing in God’s goodness despite pain, to acting creatively and lovingly even in discouragement, to fighting for light in the midst of whatever darkness I found myself. Of course, I felt instantly opposed by the forces of darkness when, the moment my stumbling prayer was complete, a roach (an orc-like thing, if ever I saw one) dropped from the ceiling onto my shoulder so that I began my part in the great story with a wild dance and a hearty dose of humor, quite the regular feature in God’s storytelling, I have discovered. And yet, from that moment, however hysterical, I knew that I was all in, that I would work and suffer and act in courage in my imperfect but heartfelt way. In that choice, I also realized that heroism begins with a challenge and a choice—to fight the dragon, to pay the debt, to tell the truth, to act rightly when the cost is high. Will I act in accordance with what I know to be true, regardless of the cost? When a character, when a girl with a book in her hand and a burning in her heart, answers yes, a heroine comes into being.

  But what does it mean to be a heroine in the modern world? This is one of the questions that great books have helped me to answer, particularly because we live in a culture that is a little suspicious of heroism. After a century of war and cynicism, as faith falls away and relativism grows, we are increasingly shaped by the postmodern idea that our lives and personal choices have little meaning beyond what brings us ease or happiness. Even if we believe in the larger story of Scripture, we’re still a little afraid of the idea of heroes because the ones we have trusted have so often failed. And of course, we don’t want to be extreme. We don’t want to place impossibly idealistic burdens on the shoulders of frail, sinful human beings, which is precisely what all of us are. We are often caught between the desire to become something more than we are when we glimpse a heroic life and the knowledge that we are flawed and confused about what this means for our own lives.

  Dillon Naylor

  Years ago I embarked on a crazy, literary-themed road trip, and along the way Dillon bravely hosted me in her lovely home, having never met me before. Thus began a kindred-spirit exchange of ideas and friendship, along with very long letters, that have enriched my heart immensely.

  My Favorite Books

  Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. One of my friends, an academic librarian, called this the most romantic book she had ever read. It took me a while to take her recommendation, but when I finally did, I started reading this book once a year. There is no book quite like it: 1930s detective story, Oxford atmosphere, literary epigraphs, witty banter, and plot twists. And at its center, it’s a love story about uniting the mind and the heart, and the process of saying yes to love.

  The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. George Eliot’s second (and most autobiographical) novel is the story of Maggie Tulliver in rural 1820s England. It is heavily weighted in the first half: it took me about a year to get through those first two hundred pages. Then Maggie’s family falls apart, she has a religious conversion, and she falls in love . . . and I ended up reading the second half of the book in one night. I have never read such a strong account of a woman choosing not to give in—to a society that undervalued her intellect, to the wrong guy (even though she was crazy about him), or to despair.

  The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. My experience with The Brothers Karamazov is unique in my reading life—I read it faster than any other book of the same length. I am not generally a fast reader and tend to get bogged down in books, which is why I’m glad I somehow read this one in ten days. That experience has stayed with me—I remember how immersed I was in the action and how after I’d finished it, I took walks through my city and felt like I was seeing things through the eyes of the central character, Alyosha.

  Dombey and Son and Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. When I was just married, had moved to a new city, and didn’t have a job yet, I had time to read. I had always loved Dickens, so I decided to start from the beginning and work my way through all his novels (I’m s
till at it). I would absolutely recommend doing this with any favorite author—you get to know them so much better, like getting to know a friend through committing to spend time with them regularly. If I hadn’t, I don’t think I would have discovered gems like Dombey and Son and Martin Chuzzlewit.

  Heroes and saints: surely these are the exceptional (or fictional) few who somehow stumbled into extraordinary acts of love or sacrifice.

  But I think this is a misunderstanding of heroism, one corrected by the reading of great stories. You can’t read Tolkien or C. S. Lewis or George Eliot or Chaim Potok and come to the conclusion that heroism is something like a rare gift or special talent, something rooted in the extreme effort of a single human being. When you read those authors, you quickly come to see that heroes and heroines are formed by the narratives they believe. Frodo didn’t become a hero by gritting his hobbit teeth and pumping his small muscles; rather, he glimpsed the greater story of which his small, faithful actions were part. He understood that his life was caught up in a narrative much larger than his cozy one in the Shire, one in which real goodness and evil battled for domination of the world he loved.

  Heroism isn’t about taking your own life in your hands; it’s about being taken hold of by something much bigger and more beautiful than yourself, by a story that draws you into its larger drama and empowers you to act in hope.

  I think it’s fascinating to realize how many of the characters in Tolkien’s drama begin by listening to a story. Aragorn is told that he is a king meant to restore his people from the time he was a small child. Gandalf tells Frodo the whole history of the evil ring before he ever asks him to take it, and Sam hears the whole thing while he is eavesdropping. Éowyn is driven by her love and her longing for the nobility of her ancestors whose stories she has heard from childhood. And even Merry and Pippin, those comical hobbits, make good on their vow to follow Frodo in all his danger by first telling him that “we know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid—but we are coming with you.”

  Heroic action begins with an identity rooted in story, the understanding that our small choices are part of the battle for light or darkness, goodness or evil. I think this is exactly the kind of identity Paul is calling new believers to take on when he calls them saints and “holy ones,” when he tells them the story of redemption and reminds them that in the new heavens and the new earth, when the end of the battle has come and every tear has been wiped away, they are destined to be kings and queens in God’s renewed cosmos.

  And this is the same identity that comes to a woman who is immersed in the great stories of literature and Scripture. In those dramas she begins to understand that she has been given what Rowan Williams calls “the burden and the freedom of a sort of authorship,”[1] the understanding that life is a story, and that she, bookish girl that she is, has the power to act, and act for the good. When she comes to that knowledge, the page turns and a marvelous new chapter begins.

  [1] Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2009), 169.

  Girl Power: My Favorite Novels about Brave and Faithful Women

  (OR, BOOKS TO GIRD YOU WITH THE GRACE TO ENDURE)

  I DISCOVERED my dear friend Esther on a day when I felt ready to quit in just about every area of my life. With a book deadline looming and three chapters still to be written, the imminent arrival of holiday guests, taxes to be done, and a house to be cleaned, I greatly wanted to abandon ship. What I would do or where I would go I did not know, but remain in my life as it was, I certainly would not. My angst was compounded by the fact that I had spent the last six months in transition, unable to determine the right job, location, or future for my life. Worn in body from work and travel, weary in mind from the uncertain days, I had come to the end of myself. Then the phone rang with news of a missing tax document (there is nothing that makes me feel existentially useless more quickly than doing my taxes). I finished the call, closed my computer, and retired to my room to plan my resignation from the responsible life.

  Esther, blessed girl, halted me in my steps. She met me as I sank into my chair, hot faced and nervous. In need of mental focus, I reached for the worn and dusty book from the top of a stack I had recently found at Goodwill. My interest at that time ran toward Dickens, and the book I opened was Bleak House. The first chapters had been a bit difficult; my reading until then had been distracted and languid, and I expected no better of the story than a few moments of calm. But Esther entered the room of my mind that day—the calm, kind woman who is, I think, the unlikely heroine of Dickens’s tale. So potent was her presence on the pages of that old book that half an hour had passed before I glanced up again.

  When I did, it was with a sigh of resignation; apparently I couldn’t in all honor quit the responsible life after all. My imagination was filled and my heart challenged by the story of this girl who determined to bring order and love into every place she dwelled, despite her own past as an unwanted child. Born in disgrace, raised by a mad and resentful aunt, cast on the charity of strangers, Esther still managed to become the heart of warmth and practicality at the center of Dickens’s mad and beautiful story. Her response after a devastating illness struck me to the core:

  I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.

  I finished the chapter and looked up amid a great quiet. I suddenly felt that the abandonment of my own tasks, or even great complaint, was not as necessary as I had imagined. Perhaps these responses were even cowardly. Throughout the next month, I mentally dwelled in Esther’s story. She was my comrade in arms in the difficult endeavor of life. Her presence punctuated my difficult days with an image of grace in the midst of weariness. I felt we were companions in a sisterhood of faithful women who brought order to the whirlwind of life. Esther helped me to see the constant round of dishes and ordinary work as the realm in which beauty is recaptured and love made tangible. She helped me, in the middle of a pile of tax documents, to look out my window, to take joy in the wonder of mountain sunlight and the calming steam of my morning cup of tea. She helped me to choose strength and to receive the fact of existence as a gift; to resist the modern idea that my frustrated feelings should rule my choices or even my outlook. In her quiet way, she empowered me to see myself as blessed; to recognize grace in the love of the family that so often irritated me in that season; to experience normal, responsible life as a story in which my own laughter, my own peace of heart could create the same joy that Esther so richly brought to hers.

  But Esther is just one of a bevy of fictional women whose faithfulness, courage, and strong spirits have shaped my character and challenged me to act in a redemptive way. The list below is composed of the novels whose female protagonists stand beside me to this day with words and lives that challenge me to follow their example. Their courage is of countless kinds: of determined love amid the ordinary, of moral bravery in wartime, of artistic daring, or of spiritual endurance, but each models the power of a woman whose choices reflect her loving and creative heart. I still hope to be counted among their number when my own life’s story is someday told.

  Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

  Elinor is the character I love in this book—a woman of deep feeling challenged by the death of her father, the care of her mother and sisters, and a prolonged (and seemingly permanent) separation from the man she loves, who yet resolves, “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself.” This book is a fascinating exploration, through Austen’s gentle, incisive narrative, of the nature of true love. Is love to “burn,” as the passionate young Marianne claims? Is it a deep and abiding friendship, as Elinor, the older sister, knows? And how ought true love to affect the lives of those connected to it? A novel that e
xplores self-giving, sorrow, and the nature of passion and of patience, it tells the story of two sisters who are some of my favorites in literature as they come to terms with society, each other, their difficult suitors, and their own understanding of love in its truest sense.

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  This is a strange novel, both dark and soaring in its depiction of a young woman with an indomitable spirit, raised without love and left to her fate as a belittled governess, but certain of love’s power and the strength of her own conscience and desiring soul. Considered scandalous to its Victorian audience at the time of its publication in 1847, this novel depicts Jane’s sojourn as a governess in a mysterious country house; her unconventional love for its master, Mr. Rochester; and her even more unconventional boldness in describing the strength, capacity, and freedom of a woman’s inner mind. I love Jane’s passionate response to Rochester, her insistence that he treat her as an intellectual and moral equal: “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!” A haunting love story, slightly gothic in touch, but masterful in its insistence upon truth, frankness, and integrity.

  The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

  A novel of artistry and vocation, this is the story of Thea Kronborg, who has a soul as big as the skies of her Western American world in the early days of the twentieth century. This is a woman who “only want[s] impossible things,” a woman in whom music grows and burgeons, longing for release. Often considered autobiographical, this is a story of an artist coming into her powers, wrestling with ambition and desire almost beyond her grasp, and facing the discouragement that dogs the heels of the creative life. I love the fierceness of Thea’s spirit, her defiance of discouragement. As one who creates, I appreciate the realistic portrayal of the hard work vital to artistic success and the way one great vision always inspires another.