Favourite Opening Lines
First lines that are an invitation to read on
This challenge was set way back in November by Marrisa W.. Simply write some favourite opening lines. I am a little late to this particular party, but as a lifelong bibliophile I couldn’t resist. So I shall begin with the book I have known and loved the longest.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
I’ve had this book through various editions as it’s been worn out with repeated reading, got lost in house moves or was lent and not returned. The first-ever copy was given to me as a Christmas present when I was nine years old. Every time I read it I discover something new in it The plight and peril of the child Jane engaged the child who opened the Christmas present, Jane and Rochester’s relationship appealed to my incurably romantic adolescent self, as I got older I saw the feminist message in it.
For a Victorian clergyman’s daughter, it is an astonishing act of literary defiance as Jane expresses her discontent with her lot — “…women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation…
