Villette
Charlotte Bronte, 1853
~250 pp. (Varies by publisher.)
Summary
With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Bronte reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Bronte's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim.
Bronte's narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There, she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquetter.
This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey—a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature. (From Knopf Doubleday.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1816
• Where—Thornton, Yorkshire, England
• Death—March 31, 1855
• Where—Haworth, West Yorkshire, England
• Education—Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in
Lancashire; Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head; Pensionnat
Heger (Belgium, to study French and German)
Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England, the third child of the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell Bronte. In 1820 the family moved to neighboring Haworth, where Reverend Brontë was offered a lifetime curacy. The following year Mrs. Brontë died of cancer, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to help raise the six children.
The four eldest sisters—Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth—attended Cowan Bridge School, until Maria and Elizabeth contracted what was probably tuberculosis and died within months of each other, at which point Charlotte and Emily returned home. The four remaining siblings—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—played on the Yorkshire moors and dreamed up fanciful, fabled worlds, creating a constant stream of tales, such as the Young Men plays (1826) and Our Fellows (1827).
Reverend Bronte kept his children abreast of current events; among these were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in which the Duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte's awareness of politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings' saga The Islanders (1827), about an imaginary world peopled with the Brontë children's real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as Charlotte's chosen character.
Throughout her childhood, Charlotte had access to the circulating library at the nearby town of Keighley. She knew the Bible and read the works of Shakespeare, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, and she particularly admired William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. In 1831 and 1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.
Midlife
In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year Charlotte finished her first novel, The Professor, but it was not accepted for publication.
However, she began work on Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety in the core of the story—the relationship between a middle-aged man and the young, naive governess who works for him—most reviewers praised the novel, helping to ensure its popularity. One of Charlotte's literary heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote her a letter to express his enjoyment of the novel and to praise her writing style, as did the influential literary critic G. H. Lewes.
Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Bronte in 1848 and Anne in 1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary circles that included such luminaries as Thackeray, whom she met for the first time in 1849; his daughter described Bronte as "a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady." In 1850 she met the noted British writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request of Reverend Bronte, later became her biographer. Charlotte's novel Villette was published in 1853.
In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who worked with her father. Sadly, less than a year later, Bronte died during her first pregnancy. While her death certificate lists the cause of death as "phthisis" (tuberculosis), there is a school of thought that believes she may have died from excessive vomiting caused by morning sickness. At the time of her death, Charlotte Brontë was a celebrated author. The 1857 publication of her first novel, The Professor, and of Gaskell's biography of her life only heightened her renown. (Bio from Barnes and Noble Classic Edition.)
Book Reviews
(Classic books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Bronte's finest novel
Virginia Woolfe
It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.
George Eliot
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the character of Lucy Snowe. Do you find her to be an admirable heroine? What qualities do you like in her, or dislike? How do you think you would behave in her circumstances?
2. Writing to her publisher, Charlotte Bronte had this to say about Vilette's protagonist: "I consider that [Lucy Snowe] is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid." What do you think of this appraisal? Do her 'unheroic' qualities make her more sympathetic or less?
3. Virginia Woolf felt that Villette was Bronte's "finest novel," and speaking about Bronte, wrote that "All her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, 'I love, I hate, I suffer.'" What do you think Woolf means? Do you find this observation interesting, appealing, or moving?
4. Why do you think Bronte sets the narrative of Villette in a foreign country?
5. Explore the theme of education in Villette: What is the role of education in Lucy Snowe's own life?
6. The conclusion of Villette is famously ambiguous (it was made purposefully so by Bronte). Do you find it a happy ending? A sad one? Discuss.
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Additional questions by LitLovers.
7. In what way does Lucy Snowe live up to her name? Why is she so withholding of her emotions? What is she afraid of? Can you pin point the first moment she reveals tenderness?
8. Lucy has a revealing conversation with little Polly, the night Polly learns she is returning to her father. When Polly asks Lucy if she likes Graham, Lucy twice tells her "a little." Then Lucy goes on, "Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults." .... "All boys are." Care to comment on that exchange? What does Lucy's attitude toward men reveal about her, and how does it serve her when she goes to Villette? At the end of the chapter, when Polly crawls into Lucy's bed for warmth, what is Lucy's response to her? What does Lucy ponder?
9. In fact, what are we to make of the entire episode about Polly? Why is it in the novel at all? Is Polly to serve as a parallel or a contrast to Lucy?
10. Why isn't Lucy's past spelled out more precisely? Can you speculate about what happened to her family? Any theories as to how she came be to alone and isolated in the world?
11. Were you disappointed that the romance between Dr. John and Lucy failed? Would he have made an appropriate mate for Lucy; in fact, is he good enough for Lucy? And why does she never reveal to him how they are connected?
12. How does M. Paul compare to Dr. John? In what way is Lucy and M. Paul's love "far better than common?"
13. From this novel, what can you ascertain about the lives of single women in the mid-19th century? What kind of security was available to them? What kinds of work? How was a woman to live if she was without family or husband?
14. Discuss the religious differences—between catholicism and protestantism—as expressed in Villette. Are those differences in evidence today?
(Questions 1-6 by Knopf Doubleday; 7-15 by LitLovers. Please feel free to use both sets, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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