"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"...

"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it." - Joseph Heller

English literature.  Most people develop a love for the subject at a young age... not me!  I found the whole subject rather tedious, especially at GCSE.  Analysing a book chapter after chapter, theme after theme, seemed to drain all the life out of the books that we were made to read.  Thus resulting in my rather lack-lustre view of literature during my teens.  We picked apart Macbeth, over-sentimentalised Romeo & Juliet, and killed the friendship in Of Mice and Men.  Safe to say, I was not the most enthusiastic English student whilst at school.

I'd always been fascinated by language, whether it was foreign or native; the semantics and syntax had always been an area that I'd enjoyed exploring.  This is probably why I decided to take English Language as an A Level instead of English Literature, despite attaining an A* at GCSE...

The ability to immerse yourself in a story, and have your own take on the story and it's characters is what I love the most about literature.  So the idea of generalising a character under umbrella terms really bored me to tears, and unfortunately turned me away from literature for a very long time indeed.

With my A-Levels complete and University on the horizon, I suddenly realised how few of the classics I had read.  I found it shocking, and disappointed in myself that I'd reached 18 without even scraping the surface of the amazing literature that our English novelists have produced.  Rookie error!

Being a keen actress during school, my Grade 8 LAMDA solo acting exam included one of Juliet's soliloquies from Romeo & Juliet.  With a firey passion for Shakespeare, but with few of his plays under my belt, I felt that the only way to rectify this was to READ READ READ.  For the first time since childhood I started to embrace literature again. Hallelujah!

I started with Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities' and from that point on I've been hooked on reading the classics, and with a philosophy of never looking back.

My favourite...

Novel: A Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Play:  Hamlet by Shakespeare
Playwright: William Shakespeare
Author: Charles Dickens
Era: Late 19th Century to Early 20th Century
Character: Romeo from Rome & Juliet by Shakespeare

Currently reading... 

Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Lauren-Eloise x