In Which We Discuss Male Benefactors

At the latest meeting of my feminist bookgroup - we read A Room of One's Own - I had a realisation.

I've recently been rereading A Little Princess at work, and a comment in A Room of One's Own made me think of it, and of Ballet Shoes.  Both books focus on female characters.  There are only one or two male characters, and in both books, they are the benefactor.  Their disappearance - and the disappearance of the money - is a huge factor in moving the plot along.  The heroine(s) suffer through hard times for a while, struggling along and learning things and then - happily - the benefactor comes back and brings the money with him.  The money is still needed; although the main characters have struggled through adversity and found their own ways in the world, they were still approaching disaster without the money.

This post has been sitting here unfinished for a while, so I'll just leave that thought here for now.

In Which We Discuss the iPhone

I bought myself an iPhone for Christmas, and one thing I'm really loving about it is the books app. I'm cheap so I've been reading free books, and so many classic books are now out of copyright. Things like The Secret Garden, and A Little Princess, and Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes, and Dickens, and Austen - lots of books I loved as a child, and lots of books that I tried to read but couldn't quite get into then, that I'm devouring now. Mostly on buses. I started crying at the end of The Secret Garden, that was embarrassing.

At the moment, I'm reading Little Women. I did read that book a few years ago, but don't remember being all that into it, and I don't recall what happened. I'm really loving it, now that I'm older.

iPhones are awesome.