Wedding Readings from Literature: Austen, Brontë and Tolstoy
Ten passages from novels, letters and children’s books, from Captain Wentworth’s letter to Piglet in the mist: prose readings that sound like people talking rather than poems being recited.
A passage from a novel does something a poem cannot. It arrives with a story already attached, and guests who know the book feel the weight of everything that came before. When Captain Wentworth writes “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope,” a reader of Persuasion knows he has waited eight and a half years to say it. When Jane Eyre describes her marriage, she has already said “Reader, I married him” and is now ten years in. The readings on this page span 1817, when Persuasion was published after Austen’s death, to 1928 and The House at Pooh Corner, and they include one real letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s of October 4, 1840, to Sophia Peabody.
They fall into three moods. Wentworth’s letter, Hawthorne’s and the love notes from Les Misérables are ardent. Brontë, George Eliot, Hardy and Tolstoy write about companionship: two people working, talking and rowing side by side. Twain and Milne are funny and, underneath, very tender.
Choosing among them
For second chances. Captain Wentworth’s Letter is the reading for long engagements, reunions and second marriages.
For friends who married. Hardy’s The Only Love Which Is Strong as Death argues that love grown from working side by side outlasts passion. Brontë’s No Woman Was Ever Nearer to Her Mate describes a marriage of constant conversation and complete trust.
For the married guests. Tolstoy’s The Little Boat finds Levin, three months married, discovering that married life takes rowing. It is wry and wise, and the people who have been married longest will nod hardest.
For a reader who knew you as a child. The Skin Horse’s speech from The Velveteen Rabbit is about how love wears us and makes us real. Milne’s I Just Wanted to Be Sure of You, from chapter 7 of The House at Pooh Corner, takes about fifteen seconds and is genuinely Milne’s, unlike many lines shared online.
For a short slot. George Eliot’s What Greater Thing Is There for Two Human Souls, from Adam Bede (1859), is about thirty-five seconds and ends on one of the most quoted questions about marriage in English.
Know what you are reading. Twain wrote Eve’s Diary after the death of his wife, Olivia, and our excerpt ends with Adam’s line at Eve’s grave. It is funny and heartbroken at once; some couples stop before the grave and end on the Eden line alone. The Les Misérables passage is in Isabel F. Hapgood’s 1887 translation, and the Tolstoy in Constance Garnett’s of 1901: credit the translators in the program.
Reading prose aloud
Prose is denser than verse and has no line breaks to tell you where to breathe, so make your own. Print the passage in large type, then go through it in pencil and mark a slash at every natural pause. Read about a third slower than you would speak, and look up at the ends of paragraphs, not mid-sentence.
Begin with a sentence of context: “From Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. Jane has been married for ten years.” Do not do voices for the Skin Horse or Piglet; a plain, warm reading is funnier and more moving.
Pairings
The Only Love Which Is Strong as Death with The Song of Songs. Hardy ends by echoing the Song of Songs; read the scripture second and guests will hear where he found his words.
Captain Wentworth’s Letter with Sonnet 116. A man whose love did not alter in eight and a half years, and the poem that defines love as exactly that.
The Little Boat with William Penn’s Never Marry but for Love. Two clear-eyed views of marriage, one Russian and one Quaker, for couples who prefer wisdom to romance.
Captain Wentworth’s Letter
Jane Austen
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in
F. W.
No Woman Was Ever Nearer to Her Mate
Charlotte Brontë
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.
We Are but Shadows
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ownest, in the times that I have been speaking of, I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings, all states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know what it is to be mingled with another’s being! Thou only hast taught me that I have a heart—thou only hast thrown a light deep downward, and upward, into my soul. Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart is touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity. Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou hast done for me?
…
If the whole world had stood between us, we must have met—if we had been born in different ages, we could not have been sundered.
What Greater Thing Is There for Two Human Souls
George Eliot
“Then we’ll never part any more, Dinah, till death parts us.”
And they kissed each other with a deep joy.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
Love Is the Salutation of the Angels
Victor Hugo, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
…
The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.
…
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.
…
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
…
What love commences can be finished by God alone.
The Only Love Which Is Strong as Death
Thomas Hardy
He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the Lower Farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.
The Little Boat
Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett
Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.
Wheresoever She Was, There Was Eden
Mark Twain
The Garden is lost, but I have found him, and am content. He loves me as well as he can; I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature, and this, I think, is proper to my youth and sex. If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one’s love for other reptiles and animals. I think that this must be so. I love certain birds because of their song; but I do not love Adam on account of his singing—no, it is not that; the more he sings the more I do not get reconciled to it. Yet I ask him to sing, because I wish to learn to like everything he is interested in. I am sure I can learn, because at first I could not stand it, but now I can. It sours the milk, but it doesn’t matter; I can get used to that kind of milk.
…
Yes, I think I love him merely because he is mine and is masculine. There is no other reason, I suppose. And so I think it is as I first said: that this kind of love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes—none knows whence—and cannot explain itself. And doesn’t need to.
…
Adam: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
What Is Real, from The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery Williams
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
I Just Wanted to Be Sure of You
A. A. Milne
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
