If there is anything I hate in literature more than poor writing it is lengthy description. Its not that I'm some action whore and cannot wait for things to get moving, it is more that I have a difficult time picturing what authors are describing so description becomes cumbersome to my mind. I started to read a fantasy book by Terry Brooks in middle school. The book was large and the print was small. In the first two pages the author described a room, specifically a desk in a room. That was enough for me. I have been gun shy against him ever since.
While I hate description in general I love description of persons. So far the only two authors to blow me away in this category are women, Jane Austin and now Harriet Beecher Stowe. Despite the weighty material in Uncle Tom's Cabin I often find myself laughing out loud and how perfectly she describes people, their motives, looks and idiosyncrasies. Especially satisfying are her conversations between men and women. Even the best husband (that I have read so far) has no clue how to understand his wife. While there is no mistaking her intelligence and sophistication the man cannot comprehend it, so he tries to accommodate his weaker and more emotional half in many ways, but each only proves he knows nothing of the fairer sex. Still the wife appreciate the misguided effort and his sincere desire to please her. The conversations between this couple are as subtle as real life, and just as humorous to an outsider looking in at any real live couple. You can sense in Stowe a liberated woman just waiting for the men of her generation to catch up, yet happy in her place in time and existence all the same.
I provide a brief reading here so you can get a feel for what I am talking about. Now, I hate reading quotes and excerpts in other people blogs, so feel free to pass over this and pick up after the italics if you are so inclined.
Now, little Mrs. Bird was a discreet woman, - a woman who never in her life said, "I told you so!" and on the present occasion, though pretty well aware of the shape her husband's meditations were taking, she very prudently forbore to meddle with them, only sat very quietly in her chair, and looked quite ready to hear her liege lord's intentions, when he should think proper to utter them... [he proceeds to announce that he must agree with her and help the slave get to Canada even though he is a senator that just past a law forbidding it]... "Your heart is better than your head in this case, John," said the wife, laying her little white hand on his. "Could I ever have loved you, had I not known you better than you know yourself?" And the little woman looked so handsome, with the tears sparkling in her eyes, that the senator thought he must be a decidedly clever fellow, to get such a pretty creature into such a passionate admiration of him.
Every chapter brings new characters and new conversations that delight and inspire me to work harder at my own observations. It is this realism she brings to her work that makes here conclusion inescapable: blacks are just as human as whites. While it almost sounds prejudice to say such a thing in our day it was a shocking conclusion in hers, but inescapable because of her sensitivity to the heart and soul of every person.
If you are averse to reading Austin because she wrote "girly" books, try Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her understanding and appeal to the human heart is unmatched in anything I have read before.