Mrs Rashkolnikov

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment is a gripping tale. One of its strengths, I think, is its descriptions of the story's characters. Here's one:

"For although Mrs Rashkolnikov was forty three, her face still preserved traces of her former beauty. Besides, she looked much younger than her years, which is almost always the case with women who keep their serenity of mind, the freshness of their impressions, and a pure and sincere warmth of heart to their old age. We may add in parenthesis that to possess all this is the only way a woman can preserve her beauty even in old age. Her hair was already beginning to grow thin and grey, crows'-foot wrinkles had long ago appeared around her eyes, her cheeks were hollow and shrunken from anxiety and grief, but her face remained beautiful....Mrs Rashklonikov was sentimental, but not cloyingly so, timid and yielding, but only up to a point: she could agree to a great deal that went against her convictions, but there was always a borderline of honesty, accepted rules of conduct, and deep-seated convictions which nothing in the world would induce her to overstep."

Shall post more quotes soon.