Judith Viorst - How Books Helped Shape My Life

In this Redbook - 1960 essay, the writer Judith Viorst relates how her favorite heroines impacted her life and fortified her own self-identity.

Literature has that kind of power. We read for many reasons - the student to study, the executive to fatten his wallet, the politician to pad votes. But Judith Viorst, you and I have access to a library of text that simply entertains. Material to snuggle up with on a blustery winter evening, to take along on a picture-perfect spring afternoon and be transported, by the author, to foreign, romantic, or even dangerous destinations. All the while we are safe and warm.

Not all of us can lead a life "on the edge." Indeed, very few of us do. Judith Viorst, in her wonderful essay gives us every motivation to curl up with a good book. While we can't always live storybook lives, we can at least peek and fantasize when we cradle a classic such as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. In her expressive way, Judith gives us the gift of thought-provoking entities and personalities that illuminate parts of us we long ago dismissed.

Nancy Drew, the young detective, portrayed as resourceful, brave and intelligent, while remaining sensitive to the elderly, courteous, and a role model of femininity.

Jo March in Little Women, who considered herself a literary spinster, married to a pen, with a series of stories as her offspring. Nevertheless, Nancy Drew and Jo March were doers. They participated and called their own shots. They lived their lives.

Jane Eyre's story is classic romance. A timeless love story about morality and doing the right thing.

Flip the coin and read Judith Viorst's impression of -Wuthering Heights' Cathy Earnshaw, whom she describes as "wild as the moors." "She lied and connived and deceived. She was insolent, selfish, manipulative and cruel." By marrying weak Edgar instead of Heathcliff, her destiny, she betrayed a love she described in throbbing, unforgettable prose as ... elemental. This is Viorst's impression. She writes with olympic-type conviction that wakes up the tiring reader.

Lost Lady Brett, of The Sun Also Rises, was a non-conformist. At the age of 18, Judith Viorst ventured and got her feet wet in that pond. Living in Greenwich Village, she allowed herself a brief enjoyable fling and determined that heroine Brett was too sad and lonely, that Cathy had died too young, that Gone With The Wind's Scarlett got Tara but lost Rhett. The price of unconventionality was too painfully high.

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