My annotations on an opening of Forster’s novel A Room with A View

Once upon a time, I took so many notes and underlined so much in my textbooks that when I got done, the books looked like a very neat second-grader had been let loose with colored pencils. My old college edition of Shakespeare’s collected works and my old graduate edition of Benson’s Chaucer looks like that. I can barely stand to look at those pages because the amount of marking is too distracting.

But lately my annotation of books has entered a new phase which involves fewer colored lines and more marginalia consisting of commentary, questions, definitions.

And just this year, we have made a real push to have the students buy the books in hard copy and annotate them. The eleventh graders were especially keen about annotating their copies of Jane Eyre: definitions of words and allusions, personal reactions, caustic commentary, plot summaries, questions. The tenth graders were less enthused about annotating A Room with a View. 

When it came time for the juniors to write their papers, we decided to let them devise their own topics based on their annotations. The papers we got were some of the best I have ever read about Bronte’s novel. They talked about architecture as a symbol, supernatural voices which guide Jane, fairy tales which parallel Jane’s character development, Rochester’s immaturity as it develops into wisdom and acceptance, the entire novel as an example of female power triumphing over male patriarchy, the actual human body as a metaphor for spiritual connection. I was astonished not just at the variety of perspective but the depth and sensitivity of their analysis.

One day, one of the girls lost her book. She was actually broken-hearted because she had lost not just the book but all of her annotations. The book was later recovered. One of her classmates had picked it up and shoved it into her backpack in the rush to go to lunch.

Now the girls see their books as very personal possessions which represent themselves and their ideas.

Now books are either throw-away things or coffee-table icons which have been signed by the author, printed on exceptional paper, are gigantic in size, etc.

But those throw-away books could become artifacts of the spirit with annotations and worthy of preserving — made valuable by the human handwriting in the margins.

My annotations on an opening of the chapter in Jane Eyre where Rochester asks Jane to marry him.