Descrine helen keller love for history and literature
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Helen Keller took the entrance exams for Radcliffe College in 1899 just after her 19th birthday. She became the first blind-deaf college student in the fall of 1900. She had thought of college romantically, that it would be a time to reflect and think about her subjects. However, her college life was different from what she had thought and from her fellow students. She had to use her hands to listen rather than take down notes like her fellow students did. The speed at which the lectures took place made it difficult for Keller to understand and remember everything that was taught.
Ms. Keller and Ms. Sullivan worked hard at Radcliffe College. Ms. Sullivan attended all of Ms. Keller's classes and helped with reading. Radcliffe was not prepared for deaf or blind students at that time. Many of the other students had never met a deaf and blind person. Although she enjoyed college, Ms. Keller thought that schedules of the students were too hectic and gave no time to sit and think. She also wrote that "we should take our education as we would take a walk in the country, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of every sort."
Helen Keller tells readers about her initial experiences with reading and how she gradually fell in love with books. Helen first read in May 1887 when she was seven years old, and it was her first connected story. There were only a few books in raised print, which Helen read repeatedly until a time when the words were so worn and pressed that she could scarcely make them out.
During her visit to Boston, she was allowed to spend time at the Institution library, and here she used to wander from bookcase to bookcase and take down whatever her “fingers lighted upon”. When she discovered the book ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ Miss Sullivan read it to her and the book became Helen’s “sweet and gentle companion” throughout her childhood.
From there, she read many books and she loved "Little Women" because it gave her a sense of kinship with girls and boys who could see and hear. She also loved ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘Wild ‘Animals I Have Known’ as she felt a genuine interest in the animals themselves, they being “real animals and not caricatures of men”. She was fascinated by Greek literature and it was Iliad that made Greece her “paradise”. According to her, great poetry did not need an interpreter but a responsive heart. Macbeth and King Lear impressed her most among Shakespeare’s works. She read the Bible for years “with an ever-broadening sense of joy and inspiration”. She said she loved it as she loved no other book.
Helen also expresses her love for history apart from her love for literature. The first book that gave her a real sense of the value of history was Swinton's "World's History," which she received on her thirteenth birthday. Among the French writers, she liked Molière and Racine best. Literature was Helen’s Utopia, where she faced no barrier of the senses. The things that she had learned and the things that were taught to her seemed of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."
She was also fond of literature and Shakespeare was her favourite. She read many of his writings. She read many books such as, ‘As You Like It’, ‘Speech on Conciliation with America’, and ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’. She also had some knowledge of the bible