i was reading a guardian article on charlotte bronte, which complains that her biography (written by elizabeth gaskell) and other facets of her life have been, throughout the years, totally puritanized, and that bronte was really a "filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend." as you can imagine, i am already finding the piece pretty awesome.

so i'm traisping along through the article, finding out all sorts of things i never knew about bronte; for example, she had hardly any teeth! she had a torrid correspondence with a monsieur from brussels! she was obsessed with sex! (well, i guess i could have inferred that some of that last part from jane eyre.)

and, the best part of all: she HATED small children. now, i love small children (well, er, normally...don't ask tommy about my rants regarding kicking my six-year old students in italy out of windows), but you are a wasted, steel-hearted person if you do not find this passage from her journal as a schoolteacher mind-bogglingly hysterical:

"I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited."

fat headed oafs! vomiting on children! oh, lord. i can't stop laughing. it's like bronte read my mind on the worst days of my brief teaching career. small children are generally lovable and adorable, but there are just sometimes when you feel ready to punt them over a wall. i'm glad to see that bronte agrees.

(ps - please do not find me psychopathic because i laugh hysterically at endorsements of child hate and often daydreamed about throwing children through windows. it's, erm...nevermind. it's nothing. i didn't say anything.)

update: once in a while i like to think about what great literary figures would have been good bloggers. i think charlotte bronte can be safely added to that list. she was ugly but filled with passion, so she could have hid behind the safety of her computer screen while composing an interesting personality; hyper intelligent but completely smothered by rage, and everybody knows you gotta be an angry freak once in a while to have a good blog. what other authors would have been good bloggers?