Hi, and welcome!

My name’s Ashley. I love all things literary and it seemed a shame for my stint in literary analysis to end once I’d doffed my cap to my university’s chancellor, so I decided it didn’t have to.

I’ve always felt that half the fun of reading is learning what other people think about the same texts as you because I think you can tell a lot about a person by the things that persist in their thoughts once they’ve finished reading something, which is why I loved seminars so much. Years after reading it for the first time, when I think of Hamlet, I think of how Hamlet’s identity as tragic hero (that we are generally taught to read him as a tragic hero) informs how we then read some of his less than pleasant words towards Gertrude and Ophelia, and when I think of The Miller’s Tale, I think of what it suggests about Chaucer criticism that Alisoun has almost ubiquitously been refigured as the wanton woman and that what Chaucer seems to signal as a non-consensual encounter in the story has been rewritten as consensual in the collective imagination, with Alisoun as the initiating party. 

I like reading so much because I like learning how somebody thinks through what they have to say about something, whether that’s through poetry, their analysis of someone’s poem, or a stranger’s understanding of the historic ‘creation’ of sexuality. This is how reading literary criticism on books I hadn’t read and didn’t have any desire to read ended up surpassing the excitement of writing my own essays while at university, and I’m somebody who loves to write an essay. It’s through trawling through the online writings and discussions of Christians of various backgrounds when I should have probably been reading an Aphra Behn play that my own positions on those issues were refined. So as uninspiring as Shakespeare and gender might be for some, I would happily read every article there is on Gertrude and Ophelia, and Polonius and Laertes to see exactly what it is Shakespeare’s handling of gender signifies for them. After all, a common interest can be shared for very different reasons.

Courtesy of my three years of reading and analysing literature at university, I can barely read, listen to or watch anything now without concentrating on a particular choice the creator has made and what it’s supposed to be doing to us or for us. I needed something to contain some of those thoughts and the notebooks just weren’t doing it anymore, so this is that container. 

‘Purple Passages’?

The name ‘Between the Purple Passages’ refers to a term often used pejoratively in literary criticism to describe very descriptive prose (a ‘purple passage’ or ‘purple prose’). I have no real contention with purple prose and usually quite enjoy those elaborate passages when they pop up. I chose the name because while I appreciate any writer clearly in the thralls of their own imagination and choosing to express this in ‘the purple way’, I generally find what is said in-between those sections more interesting. 

I hope you enjoy getting to know my mind through my readings of novels, short stories, poems, theatre, cinema, and non-fiction, and I hope they will enrich your own thinking of the texts you love or have yet to come to love,

Ashley