68 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2021
  2. icla2021.jonreeve.com icla2021.jonreeve.com
    1. the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.

      lots of repetition

    2. the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin

      This is such a weird physical movement to picture.

    3. very, very

      Interesting repetition. I don't think we've really seen this in use.

    4. business.

      It's interesting the different weight the word 'business' has. In a lot of ways, romance is discussed in very financial and business-like terms

    5. She looked at herself in profile

      Here we get a literal description of a character profile.

    6. Polly was a slim girl of nineteen

      Half of this story seems to be character profiles.

    7. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? He

      This speaks to thee way he represents financial freedom for her.

    8. I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse

      Is this an Irish tradition? I haven't heard of this.

    9. She was tired.

      Me too.

    10. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house.

      Like we were mentioning in Zulip, this line feels so cliched as an opening, but even here it feels weird. It's interesting to think about the phrases or lines that feel unique now that will turn into cliches in coming years.

    11. E

      I also didn't realize that this is where 'penny dreadfuls' came from either! The more you know.

    12. The Halfpenny Marvel.

      I've never heard of 'story papers' before but I guess these are all story papers.

  3. Jul 2021
    1. H’m, h’m! Well, well. Perhaps so...

      Such personality

    2. smiling that peculiar little half-smile that women found so fascinating. Ah, Harold was too handsome, too handsome by far; that had been the trouble all along. No man had a right to such eyes, such lashes, and such lips; it was uncanny

      I like how we fill in the blanks of Harold's handsomeness. When Mansfield writes "such eyes, such lashes, and such lips" are we all imagining the same such features?

    3. Bill and Dennis ate enormously

      They're living rent-free in his house and his mind.

    4. William got up and went through the French windows into the garden, and as he stood there in the shadow he heard the bathers coming up the sandy road; their voices rang through the quiet

      This is such a long paragraph.

    5. very cool.

      Modern sense of the word cool?

    6. William

      Our first male protagonist?

    7. It couldn’t wait; it was dancing already.

      pathetic fallacy

    8. Laurie leaned forward and put his hand on Laura’s knee.

      Same characters from "The Garden Party"?

    9. Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say

      This is such a strange sentence construction

    10. But the difference between that dusty-smelling hall—with calico texts on the walls, the poor terrified little woman in a brown velvet toque with rabbit’s ears thumping the cold piano, Miss Eccles poking the girls’ feet with her long white wand—and this was so tremendous that Leila was sure if her partner didn’t come and she had to listen to that marvellous music and to watch the others sliding, gliding over the golden floor, she would die at least, or faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars.

      longest sentence in the text?

    11. Mrs. R.

      Interesting shift of name.

    12. a white hat with purple feathers,

      So far, I'm noticing a lot of hats in Mansfield with either flowers or feathers.

    13. I saw

      Who is our narrator?

    14. impatient voice

      I'm not clear on who this voice belongs to.

    15. timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring

      long description for a single glance

    16. leghorn
    17. “I’ve forgotten too.”

      This whole story felt like they were forgetting what to say. Like the Garden Party, the female protagonists end the narrative leaving the reader guessing their words.

    18. What possible excuse could they make? It sounded such an appallingly heartless thing to do. Such a wicked advantage to take of a person because he happened to be helpless at the moment

      Feels like the father might be helpless for more than a moment given the circumstances.

    19. white, terrified blancmange

      Love that she calls the blancmange terrified.

    20. What would it do?

      Constantia seems keen on giving people/creatures things. She wants to give the porter her father's hat and the mouse a biscuit.

    21. almost frighteningly alive

      interesting way to describe a flower

    22. squiz

      "A squiz is a short, close look at something. It can also be used as a verb meaning to take such a look. Squiz is Australian and New Zealand slang.'

    23. Against the karakas.

      Karakas trees are highly toxic to dogs. I wonder if this will come up...apparently leads to a painful death.

    24. green t

      More green

    25. green b

      Already a lot of language about the color of objects.

    1. Chapter I

      The length of Cuff's chapters feels in character.

    2. Mr. Godfrey, for instance–though professionally a sort of consoler-general–seemed to be at a loss where to look for his own resources. Having no company to amuse him, and getting no chance of trying what his experience of women in distress could do towards comforting Miss Rachel, he wandered hither and thither about the house and gardens in an aimless uneasy way.

      description of garden

    3. The true story of the broken marriage engagement comes first in point of time, and must therefore take the first place in the present narrative. Tracing my way back along the chain of events, from one end to the other, I find it necessary to open the scene, oddly enough as you will think, at the bedside of my excellent client and friend, the late Sir John Verinder.

      Doing homework 2, and came back to see how long some of Bruff's sentences are. This paragraph is two sentences. The man takes his time getting a thought out.

    4. We will not say this was the language of remorse–we will say it was the language of hysterics.

      So the consensus is Rachel is not remorseful. She is hysterical or putting on an act of hysteria to hide what she actually did?

    5. You live a great deal too much in the society of women. And you have contracted two very bad habits in consequence. You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them.

      Very Victorian flavored sexism.

    6. We had a meeting that evening of the Select Committee of the Mothers’-Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society. The object of this excellent Charity is–as all serious people know–to rescue unredeemed fathers’ trousers from the pawnbroker, and to prevent their resumption, on the part of the irreclaimable parent, by abridging them immediately to suit the proportions of the innocent son

      What is she saying?

    7. I should call, unbecomingly flushed.

      Miss Clack is so funny. She strikes me as a Victorian mean girl.

    8. On Friday, nothing happened–except that one of the dogs showed signs of a breaking out behind the ears. I gave him a dose of syrup of buckthorn, and put him on a diet of pot-liquor and vegetables till further orders. Excuse my mentioning this. It has slipped in somehow. Pass it over please. I am fast coming to the end of my offences against your cultivated modern taste. Besides, the dog was a good creature, and deserved a good physicking; he did indeed.

      why is this kept in?

    9. Bating her lame foot and her leanness (this last a horrid draw-back to a woman, in my opinion), the girl had some pleasing qualities in the eye of a man. A dark, keen, clever face, and a nice clear voice, and a beautiful brown head of hair counted among her merits. A crutch appeared in the list of her misfortunes. And a temper reckoned high in the sum total of her defects.

      more descriptions of women 'from the eye of a man'

    10. In a minute more, Miss Rachel came downstairs–very nicely dressed in some soft yellow stuff, that set off her dark complexion, and clipped her tight (in the form of a jacket) round the waist. She had a smart little straw hat on her head, with a white veil twisted round it. She had primrose-coloured gloves that fitted her hands like a second skin. Her beautiful black hair looked as smooth as satin under her hat. Her little ears were like rosy shells–they had a pearl dangling from each of them. She came swiftly out to us, as straight as a lily on its stem, and as lithe and supple in every movement she made as a young cat. Nothing that I could discover was altered in her pretty face, but her eyes and her lips. Her eyes were brighter and fiercer than I liked to see; and her lips had so completely lost their colour and their smile that I hardly knew them again. She kissed her mother in a hasty and sudden manner on the cheek.

      So many similes

    11. as you may have noticed, very severe.

      Yes, I have noticed. It's interesting that he noticed me noticing him.

    12. But she seems to have lost pride, and proper feeling, and everything. She frightened me, father, when Mr. Franklin said those words. They seemed to turn her into stone. A sudden quiet came over her, and she has gone about her work, ever since, like a woman in a dream.”

      Betteredge is so bad at understanding/picking up on love, that he denies Rosanna's feelings and even now when with the description of her heartbreak, it comes from Penelope.

    13. “And mind, if you ever take to growing roses, the white moss rose is all the better for not being budded on the dog-rose, whatever the gardener may say to the contrary!”

      I can't tell if all the commentary on the rose garden is pat of the mystery/plot or just part of Sergeant's quirks. Sergeant Cuff reminds me of Detective Blanc from Knives Out. I wonder if the seemingly goofy/silly yet intelligent detective trope comes from The Moonstone

    14. throwing me off.

      It's so funny that Sergeant is just actively calling Mr Betteredge out for his biases.

    15. My lady rallied a little after having opened her heart to me–being, naturally, a woman of a high courage, as I have already told you.

      Sometimes, it's hard for me to tell whether Betteredge's narrative should be read with a sarcastic register.

    16. “I told you I was uneasy about her,” he said. “And now you see why.”

      ...Franklin starting to seem suspicious

    17. melancholy

      We get it, Betteredge, everything Sergeant Cuff does everything in a melancholy way.

    18. We reached the house, in the temper of two strange dogs, coupled up together for the first time in their lives by the same chain.

      Betteredge uses some interesting figurative language. I'm curious to see if the style changes in the Second Period.

    19. o miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him.

      We already know that Betteredge pays close attention to the health (ie weight) of women, but I think this might be the first time (?) we get such a physical description of a male character.

    20. How, and with what result, you shall presently see.

      When did the term 'cliffhanger' emerge? Are the chapter endings conventional of the time or another instance of trendsetting?

    21. For all I can tell, everybody in the house may have known where the jewel was, last night

      Aha so everyone is a suspect

    22. Then she remembered that the Diamond might take to shining of itself, with its awful moony light in the dark

      Description of the Diamond. I'm going to tag this as character description assuming we're calling The Moonstone a character.

    23. If you know anything of the fashionable world, you have heard tell of the three beautiful Miss Herncastles. Miss Adelaide; Miss Caroline; and Miss Julia–this last being the youngest and the best of the three sisters, in my opinion; and I had opportunities of judging, as you shall presently see.

      description of beautiful women by herncastle

    24. They were nearly as big as their brother; spanking, yellow-haired, rosy lasses, overflowing with super-abundant flesh and blood; bursting from head to foot with health and spirits.

      This description is really something. Character description might be interesting to keep in mind later for computational analysis.

    25. Was the legacy of the Moonstone a proof that she had treated her brother with cruel injustice? or was it a proof that he was worse than the worst she had ever thought of him?

      it's interesting that we get Lady Verinder's thoughts from Betteredge like this.

    26. June the sixteenth brought an event which made Mr. Franklin’s chance look, to my mind, a worse chance than ever.

      Ok, so both Godfrey and Franklin are Rachel's cousins, and both of them are hoping to court her?

    27. Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do

      Betteridge, it was Isaac Watts who said that.

    28. (Samuel, the footman)

      I don't know why, but parentheses always strike me as funny in first person 'witness' accounts like these or generally texts from the time. Betteridge will gladly take an entire paragraph to take an aside, but then 'hide' these little notes away.

    29. Miss Rachel so particular about the dressing of her hair, and had never seen her look so bright and pretty as she did when she went down to meet Mr. Franklin in the drawing-room.

      hmm, they are cousins, no?

    30. in the interests of truth

      I know this is a detective novel, so part of the intrigue is related to discovering what's true and what's not, but I wonder how many times 'the truth' will be explicitly named like this.

    31. nd I declare, on my word of honour, that what I am now about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth.

      This reminds me of the intro to Gulliver's Travels which also opens with a letter or 'extracted family paper' declaring the text's appeal to authority and truthfulness.