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Villette (Penguin Classics)

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Mr. Smith had already given her warm praise for the first half of the story; and though both he and Mr. Williams made some natural and inevitable criticisms when the whole was in their hands, yet she had good reason to feel that substantially Cornhill was satisfied, and she herself could rest, and take pleasure—and for the writer there is none greater—in the thing done, the task fulfilled. In January 1853 she was in London correcting proofs, and on the 24th of that month the book appeared. But though she is Jane Eyre over again there are differences, and all, it seems to me, to Lucy’s advantage. She is far more intelligible—truer to life and feeling. Morbid she is often; but Lucy Snows so placed, and so gifted, must have been morbid. But they are very few; they spoil no pleasure. And as a rule the book has not only imagination and romance, it has knowledge of life, and accuracy of social vision, in addition to all the native shrewdness, the incisive force of the early chapters of Jane Eyre.

In September, though quite unfit for concentrated effort, she was stern with herself, would not let her friend, Ellen Nussey, come—vowed, cost what it might, “to finish.” In vain. She was forced to give herself the pleasure of her friend’s company “for one reviving week.” Then she resolutely sent the kind Ellen Nussey away, and resumed her writing. Villette is noted not so much for its plot as for its acute tracing of Lucy's psychology. The novel, in a gothic setting, simultaneously explores themes of isolation, doubling, displacement and subversion, and each of their impacts upon the protagonist's psyche. [1] My first impression of Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853) was the familiarity of the writing — if I had no inclination of the author or book title, but merely “read it blind,” I think I would still know it was Charlotte Brontë. Character reigns supreme over the novel — that of the narrator, Lucy Snowe, as well as those around her. Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight—forgotten in the park—here once more flowed in upon perception. High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. The music and the mirth of the fête, the fire and bright hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed.

The step in contemplation is no hasty one; on the gentleman’s side at least, it has been meditated for many years, and I hope that in at last acceding to it, I am acting right; it is what I earnestly wish to do. My future husband is a clergyman. He was for eight years my father’s curate. He left because the idea of this marriage was not entertained as he wished.

It is as poets then, in the larger sense, and as poets of passion, properly so-called—that is, of exalted and transfiguring feeling—that writers like George Meredith, and George Sand, and Charlotte Brontë affect the world, and live in its memory. Never was Charlotte Brontë better served by this great gift of poetic vision than in Villette—never indeed so well. The style of the book throughout has felt the kindling and transforming influence. When Gaskell had asked Brontë about fact and fiction in the novels, she got some unexpected answers. Brontë was evasive about whether she had based the opium trance in Villette on personal experience (in an age when opium was readily available and often used), but when asked about the mystical episode in Jane Eyre of Rochester “calling” to Jane across hundreds of miles, she insisted that it was true, “it really happened”. Strangely, a letter exists, written in the 1880s, from Constantin to another ex-pupil, Meta Mossman, that might shed some light on this claim, in which he suggests that he and Mossman could keep in touch using just such a form of emotional telepathy as Rochester extends to Jane, “communication between two distant hearts, instantaneous, without paper, without pen, or words, or messenger”. Whether Constantin suggested something like this to Brontë many years earlier (leading her to think a telepathic connection “really happened”), or whether he was responding to her world-famous novel is impossible to tell; the byplay between art and life is too intermeshed. With regard to the acting of the great, the “possessed” Rachel, it made as deep an impression on Charlotte Brontë, as it produced much about the same time on Matthew Arnold. The poor story-teller struggled in vain against illness and melancholy. She writes to Mrs. Gaskell of “deep dejection of spirits,” and to Mr. Williams that it is no use grumbling over hindered powers or retarded work, “for no words can make a change.”Of all the characters, Dr. John no doubt is the least tangible, the least alive. Here the writer was drawing enough from reality to spoil the freedom of imagination that worked so happily in the creation of Paulina, and not enough to give to her work that astonishing and complex truth which marks the portrait of Paul Emanuel. But to what might she not have attained had she lived, had she gone on working? Alas! the delicate heart and life had been too deeply wounded; and in the quiet marriage which followed immediately on Villette the effort to be simply, personally happy proved too much for one who had known so well how to suffer. Do not let me think of them too often, too much, too fondly,” I implored: “Let me be content with a temperate draught of the living stream: let me not run athirst, and apply passionately to its welcome waters: let me not imagine in them a sweeter taste than earth’s fountains know. Oh! would to God I may be enabled to feel enough sustained by an occasional, amicable intercourse, rare, brief, unengrossing and tranquil: quite tranquil!

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