Above: the Cobb at Lyme Regis features in Persuasion by Jane Austen's and The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. I've always wanted to see it. I arrived in the town about 8pm - the evening was warm, and all the tourists had left for the day.
Above: after parking my car I had a fish and chip supper on a bench on the promenade. From where I sat I could see the curve of the Cobb in the distance. Two pigeons came along to watch me.
Above: view from the top of the Cobb looking back at the town - the cliffs you can see are known as the Jurassic Coast from the large numbers of fossils that can be found there. Once up on the Cobb I felt very unsafe. The drops are sheer on both sides, and the surface is slanted so that if you fell over you could easily roll into the sea.
Above: steps leading up to the top of the Cobb. The exact location of the accident in Persuasion is disputed, but I this flight of steps most closely matched my imagination. For some reason all the time I was up on the top of the Cobb I felt giddy - perhaps the movement of the sea made me disoriented.
Above: the end of the Cobb where Meryl Streep (as Sarah Woodruff) stood in the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman. I wouldn't want to stand there in a storm. Even on a mild summer day, with a calm sea, I felt unsafe.
Above: when I returned home I reread Fowles, getting the book out of the library rather than buying it. There was no need to reread Persuasion as I know it so well. I know these things are hard to judge, but probably Jane Austen is the greatest novelist of all time.
3 comments:
Whilst I do like her, a lot, you really think so? Jane Austen? The greatest novelist of all time?
Have you read Tolstoy? Vladimir Nabokov? William Faulkner? Toni Morrison?...
Indeed have you read Tolstoy in Russian? If you have not you have not read Tolstoy. I have read Nabokov (Speak Memory) and regard him as flawed. Your suggestion of Faulkner and Morrison I cannot take seriously.
About Tolstoy, perhaps, but although lots of things are lost in translation, one can still see that "Anna Karenina" is a masterpiece, better than any of Jane Austen's novels.
Regard Nabokov as flawed based on 1 book, which is not even a novel? Very amusing.
I trust you have that view on Faulkner because some time in the past you tried to read "The sound and the fury" and failed, and didn't get it, and thus put the blame on him instead of yourself? I suggest starting with other novels by Faulkner, "As I lay dying" for instance, and rereading "The sound and the fury".
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