On Anna Karenina, Loving Literature, and Wellesley
A version of this article was published in Counterpoint 's May issue in print and online . I have marked my time at Wellesley in books. When I recall the people, lessons, and love I’ve experienced during my four years here, I always remember a novel I was reading or a paper I was writing alongside them, a character I was falling in love with or an image I was tracking. Jane Eyre undercuts my Wellesley experience, illuminating every image in every book I read until I found my senior thesis topic of birds and women in Victorian literature. Other books are scattered, left behind in past semesters with only memories to speak for them. My Antonia is mixed in with my sexual awakening. Beloved evokes a time of aching for my mother in a Freeman double. Middlemarch ’s Dorothea Brooke looks like me junior year, an ambitious, silly dreamer about to study abroad in her own small town in England. So does Tess of Tess of the D’Urbervilles , standing on the top of the glorious Vale
