Read "The Bright Book of Life" by Harold Bloom online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I FIRST READ Vanity Fair in 1947, just before going up to my freshman year at Cornell. With each successive reading I am more and more delighted by Becky Sharp and even more puzzled by William Makepeace Thackeray. The voice speaking the book is frequently intolerable to me. Charlotte Brontë, who venerated Thackeray, drives me away by her brutality toward her male readers. I do not like to be thumped over the head as I read. Poor Rochester, a surrogate for George Gordon Lord Byron, is progressively mutilated by Charlotte Brontë and her surrogate Jane Eyre. Approaching eighty-eight, I do not want either to be cudgeled or sneered at by a novelist. Back in the days when I spent some time in the company of Philip Roth, he would cheer me by saying: "Harold, we are here to be insulted. " Perhaps.
I have read most of Thackeray's fiction and admire, in addition to Vanity Fair,