But in the end its what you learn about yourself and how to create a space for someone else (even just the idea of them) within yourself. Though mine was never realized, and hers was satiated, I still felt that the abrupt, ambiguous ending was a nod to the sense that this kind of love can never make sense, never be truly tested or realized. I felt like I understood my own feelings, she gave words to things I haven't been able to describe before. It really was so much more than a story about a "taboo" love, it was a story about the nature of love itself, and our capacity to accept it. Second of all, the tension built up in this story in such an appealing way. Characters were developed, and the third person omniscient narration worked for the kind of story she wanted to tell, slowly revealing feelings and perspectives before they were known to the other characters involved. This is perhaps why I feels so strange commenting on this tale.įirst off, this story was really well written. But now as a teacher myself I am super critical of these types of tales and the perspective they take. I have a penchent for these, because no one could have been more in love than I with a high school teacher. I picked this up because it was on a list of books that dealt with the student/teacher romantic relationship.
Beautiful, lyrical prose and a quasi gothic atmosphere, with all those windswept ocean landscapes and starry skies filled with birds of prey made Flanders Point a gem of a read. The ten years that separate them is an uncrossable gulf yet they cannot prevent themselves from teetering on its edge. If you hung them all on a clothesline and picked only three, you'd have enough to produce a spark, a thin column of smoke, maybe even a small flame."Īnd so it is for eighteen-year old Charlotte Delafield and her English teacher Brian Parton, who meet at a strict Connecticut girls boarding school in the 1950s. Internal changes, growth, expansion, opening, tapping into unconscious longings-well, most of those words describe an erotic relationship. "If you think in terms of teaching as a shared journey of discovery, instead of just a job, look what's involved: sharing of knowledge, hunger for understanding, desire for approval, opening of another spirit, penetration of one mind into another, the mystery of the unknown, the pleasure of success, mental intimacy in shared moments of revelation, maybe even climactic moments.
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