Oxford Class Dismissed

Oxford class dismissed: The Brontës

The end of my Oxford University class on the Brontës has come. Now, I turn in my final paper. Come next week it will hit me that I do not have any reading assignments. No forums online to post to and respond to. No paper to write. No notes to take and posts to put together. I am actually working on my final paper right now (above).

I will no longer be reading the novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne to analyze passages. Nor read about their lives and interpreting how their real life experiences and travel influenced their writings. My mind won't be traveling every night back to the 1830s and 1840s England when these sisters lived and wrote. I will miss this. I loved being in a class again. I loved being stretched in my thinking and learning. I loved reading other classmates' opinions and thoughts. They were so eloquent and thought-provoking, I usually didn't know how to write something that would even come close to matching their ability to provide unique thoughts on a topic or passage. And that is the beauty of differing types of writing. We would all write out our thoughts, and catch little points others were making that opened our eyes to something else about the story or the author.

But a little break is also good. My life has been moving a million miles per hour lately, with many good things, so I will have a little more time to focus on some other books and writing that I was neglecting. So for now, I will tuck my Brontë novels back on my bookshelf, but they won't be sitting too long, since I am moving in less than a month!

When kindly thoughts that would have way,
flow back discouraged to my breast;
I know there is, though far away
a home where heart and soul may rest.

-Anne Brontë