Day 4 - A Book That Makes You Sad

The saddest, most tragic book has to be Wuthering Heights. It has a great, happy, perfect ending, but to get to that you have to wade through the dark, murky, fathomless depths of evil and simmering jealousy and rage and one tragedy, horror and deep, deep sadness after another.

Wuthering Heights is blatent in its sadness, but one book that is not so blatent, and even sweet, but still leaves you with a taste of sadness at the end is this novella.

Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell (the same author of North and South and Cranford).

I think this is one of her little known novels. I loved it, but I sometimes find myself still thinking of Phillis and her sadness, her own personal tragedy. It's sad because what happens to her happens to so many.

It's a human story. A story of innocence and first love and sweetness and loss and tragedy. I began the book hoping for a happy ending, so be warned that the ending is not happy, but it's not tragic either. Nobody dies (that I can recall), but it's a living death. But I won't spoil it and tell you about it.

I think also, it's about hope, and learning to live with sadness. It's a lesson for the reader to not let personal tragedies distort or ruin life. That there is always more hope and that life is worth living. That is what I took from it, anyway; what I took from Phillis. But it's funny that I still think of Phillis - a fictional creation of the writer, but there is something very real about her.