This Week in Reading April 15 - 21

This is National Library Week and the reading is pleasing. We can celebrate the birthdays of the creators of some of the most conflicted women in literature, Jane Eyre and Isabel Archer. There are also remarkable women among the authors this week, along with a couple of important Midwestern voices who spoke to and for their peers.

This Week's Question: Which of this week's authors said, "As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever"?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The War of Jenkins' Ear lasted nine years between Britain and Spain, 1739 - 1748, and resulted in not much more than a horrific drain on the economy and manpower of both sides. The drumbeat for the war between the two sea powers received its loudest boom when Robert Jenkins, a sailor, exhibited in Parliament what he claimed to be his own ear which he said had been cut off by Spanish coast guarders seven years previous when they boarded his British ship. Like many such reasons for unnecessary wars, its legitimacy has been long disputed.