4 (p. 84) Désirée... was reading to me some little essay of Mrs. Barbauld’s: The reference is to Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), a novelist and essayist who was a member of the eighteenth-century literary circle the Bluestockings, often satirized as a group of pedantic and pretentious women. Throughout the novel Lucy fears being mistaken for a “blue.”
5 (p. 123) This longing ... it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did ... after the manner ofjael to Sisera: Sisera, a cruel leader of the Israelites, escaped a battle by seeking shelter in Jael’s tent. While he was sleeping she murdered him by driving a nail into his brain. The biblical account is given in the book of Judges (chapter 4).
6 (p. 233) Nebuchadnezzar’s hottest furnace: In the biblical account in the book of Daniel (chapter 3), three men refuse to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s idol and he throws them into a burning furnace. God saves them and they emerge from the flames unharmed.
7 (p. 261) the desolate and sepulchral summit of a Nebo: Mount Nebo is in Jordan. In the Bible, God shows Moses the promised land from Nebo but refuses to let him travel there. Moses dies soon after (Deuteronomy 34).
8 (p. 286) I served two masters: I bowed down in the house of Rimmon, and lifted the heart at another shrine: In the Bible (2 Kings 5), Naaman is converted to believing in God when Elisha cures him of leprosy. After his conversion he continues to pray to the god Rimmon.
9 (p. 291) What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: Vashti is a beautiful biblical queen. The actress described here is modeled after the famous French actress Mademoiselle Rachel (Elisa Félix, 1802-1858). Brontë saw Rachel perform during the time she was composing Villette.
10 (p. 302) feasted on my crust from the Barmecide’s loaf: In a story from The Arabian Nights, Schacabac is served imaginary food and drink by the wealthy Barmecide family. He goes along with the joke until he is rewarded with real sustenance.
Inspired by
Charlotte Brontë and Villette
It is in every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another ... it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time.
—Patrick Brontë
Aside from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) is the best-known biography of a literary figure in the English language and the first life story of one Victorian woman novelist written by another. Patrick Brontë and Arthur Nicholls—Brontë’s father and husband, respectively—asked Gaskell (1810-1865), a close friend of Charlotte’s, to write the book after Brontë’s death in 1855. Gaskell is also remembered as the author of Cranford (1853), Cousin Phillis (1864), and Wives and Daughters (1866).
Villette is widely considered to be Charlotte Brontë’s most autobiographical work (even though Brontë gave Jane Eyre the subtitle “An Autobiography”), and she composed in it almost complete isolation at Gaskell’s home. In Villette, the fictional capital city and the country of Labassecour stand in for Brussels, Belgium, where Brontë taught at a school for two years, beginning in February 1842. The novel’s Paul Emmanuel, a teacher, has a real-life counterpart in Constantin Héger, the husband of the school’s director. Brontë developed an infatuation with Héger during her time at the Brussels school, where they tutored one another in French and English. In creating her heroine, Lucy Snowe, Brontë drew on this experience as well as the abiding loneliness she felt at the school after the departure of her sister Emily.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë contains lengthy excerpts from Charlotte’s letters, such as the following revealing note to her friend and sympathetic reader W. S. Williams dated November 6, 1852, in which Brontë discusses her fictional counterpart, Lucy Snowe:
You say that she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she 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. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance; it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness.
One important autobiographical element present in Villette, but not in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, is any specific mention of Brontë’s intense feelings for Héger. Warm, good-humored, and scrupulous, Gaskell wished to avoid causing additional sadness to Brontë’s widower by detailing Brontë’s passion for Héger, even though Nicholls and Brontë were not married until 1854, ten years after Brontë had left Brussels. For her part, Héger’s wife remained upset and embarrassed by her depiction as Mme. Beck in Villette, so much so that she refused to be interviewed by Gaskell for the biography. One possible allusion to Brontë’s love for Constantin Héger appears in a letter to her publisher George Smith dated December 6, 1852, and reprinted in The Life of Charlotte Brontë:
I must pronounce you right again, in your complaint of the transfer of interest in the third volume, from one set of characters to another. It is not pleasant, and it will probably be found as unwelcome to the reader, as it was, in a sense, compulsory upon the writer. The spirit of romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting; it would have fashioned a paramount hero, kept faithfully with him, and made him supremely worshipful; he should have been an idol, and not a mute, unresponding idol either; but this would have been unlike real life—inconsistent with truth—at variance with probability. I greatly apprehend, however, that the weakest character in the book is the one I aimed at making the most beautiful; and, if this be the case, the fault lies in its wanting the germ of the real—in its being purely imaginary.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë became one of Gaskell’s best-selling books and helped to cement Brontë’s literary reputation for generations to come. The critic George Henry Lewes, upon reading Gaskell’s book, wrote to her saying that it “will, I think, create a deep and permanent impression.... One learns to love Charlotte, and deeply to respect her.”
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Charlotte Brontë’s Villette through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
Robert Southey
Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.
—from a letter to Charlotte Brontë (March 1837)
Harriet Martineau
The whole three volumes [of Villette] are crowded with beauties—with the good things for which we look to the clear sight, deep feeling and singular, though not extensive, experience of life which we associate with the name of ‘Currer Bell.’ But under all, through all, over all, is felt a drawback, of which we were anxious before, but which is terribly aggravated here—the book is almost intolerably painful. We are wont to say, when we read narratives which are made up of the external woes of life, such as may and do happen every day, but are never congregated in one experience—that the author has no right to make readers so miserable. We do not know whether the right will be admitted in the present case, on the ground of the woes not being external; but certainly we ourselves have felt inclined to rebel against the pain, and, perhaps on account of protraction, are disposed to deny its necessity and truth. With all her obj
ectivity, ‘Currer Bell’ here afflicts us with an amount of subjective misery which we may fairly remonstrate against; and she allows us no respite—even while treating us with humour, with charming description and the presence of those whom she herself regards as the good and gay. In truth, there is scarcely anybody that is good—serenely and cheerfully good, and the gaiety has pain in it. An atmosphere of pain hangs about the whole, forbidding that repose which we hold to be essential to the true presentment of any large portion of life and experience.
—from the Daily News (February 3, 1853)
The Spectator
Villette is Brussels, and Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself.’ Of plot, strictly taken as a series of coherent events all leading to a common result, there is none; no more, at least, than there would be in two years of any person’s life who had occupations and acquaintances, and told us about them. Of interesting scenes, and of well-drawn characters, there is, on the other hand, abundance ; and these, though they fail to stimulate the curiosity of the reader like a well-constructed plot, sustain the attention, and keep up a pleasant emotion, from the first page to the last.
All the emotions excited by art are pleasant, even though their subject-matter be in itself painful; otherwise we should have hesitated in applying the term to the emotions caused by this book. For while the characters are various, happily conceived, and some of them painted with a truth of detail rarely surpassed, the centre figure—the girl who is supposed to write the book—is one who excites sympathies bittersweet, and in which there is little that is cheerful or consoling. Like Jane Eyre in her intense relish for affection, in her true-heartedness, in her great devotion to the small duties of her daily life, there is nothing of a compensation for the affection denied her. If it were not too harsh a word to be used of so good a girl as Miss Lucy Snowe, one might almost say that she took a savage delight in refusing to be comforted, in a position indeed of isolation and hardship, but one still that a large experience of mankind and the miseries incident to the lot of humanity would hardly pronounce to be by comparison either a miserable or a degraded lot. But this book, far more than Jane Eyre, sounds like a bitter complaint against the destiny of those women whom circumstances reduce to a necessity of working for their living by teaching, and who are debarred from the exercise of those affections which are indeed the crown of a woman’s happiness, but which it is unwise and untrue to make indispensable to a calm enjoyment of life and to an honourable and useful employment of it. Nor do we think that the morbid sensibility attributed to Lucy Snowe is quite consistent with the strength of will, the daring resolution, the quiet power, the discretion and good sense, that are blended with it in Currer Bell’s conception. Still less, perhaps, is such a quality, involving as it does a constant tormenting self-regard, to be found in common with clear insight into the characters and motives of others, and with the habit of minute observation, which, resulting in admirable and clear delineation, makes Lucy Snowe’s autobiography so pleasant a book in all respects except the spasms of heart-agony she is too fond of showing herself in—we will not venture to hint of showing herself off in, for there is a terrible feeling of reality about them, which seems to say that they are but fictitious in form, the transcripts of a morbid but no less than real personal experience.
—February 12, 1853
George Eliot
I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.
—from a letter to Mrs. Bray (February 15, 1853)
Matthew Arnold
Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact, put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long run.
—from a letter to Mrs. Forster (April 14, 1853)
Algernon Charles Swinburne
There is a certain charm of attraction as well as compassion wrought upon us by the tragic childhood of Jane Eyre; and no study can exceed for exquisite veracity and pathos the subtle and faultless portrait of the child Paulina in the opening chapters of Villette; but the attraction of these is not wholly or mainly the charm of infancy ... it comes rather from the latent suggestion or refraction of the woman yet to be, struck sharply back or dimly shaded out from the deep glass held up to us of a passionate and visionary childhood. We begin at once to consider how the children in Charlotte Brontë’s books will grow up.
—from A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877)
Leslie Stephen
Although the secret of Miss Brontë’s power lies, to a great extent, in the singular force with which she can reproduce acute observations of character from without, her most esoteric teaching, the most accurate reflex from her familiar idiosyncracies, is of course to be found in the characters painted from within. We may infer her personality more or less accurately from the mode in which she contemplates her own spirit. Among the characters who are more or less mouthpieces of her peculiar sentiment we may reckon not only Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre, but, to some extent, Shirley, and, even more decidedly, Rochester. When they speak we are really listening to her own voice, though it is more or less disguised in conformity to dramatic necessity. There are great differences between them; but they are such differences as would exist between members of the same family, or might be explained by change of health or internal circumstances. Jane Eyre has not had such bitter experience as Lucy Snowe; Shirley is generally Jane Eyre in high spirits, and freed from harassing anxiety; and Rochester is a really spirited sister of Shirley’s, though he does his very best to be a man, and even an unusually masculine specimen of his sex.
—from Cornhill Magazine (December 1877)
Anthony Trollope
In Villette, too, and in Shirley, there is to be found human life as natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest as those told in Jane Eyre. The character of Paul in the former of the two is a wonderful study. [Brontë] must herself have been in love with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.
—from his Autobiography (1883)
QUESTIONS
1. A contemporary reviewer in the Spectator remarked that Villette, even more than Jane Eyre, reads like a bitter complaint against the destiny of those women who have to work. Do you see this in the book? What is the relationship between women and work in Brontë’s novel?
2. Matthew Arnold asked, “Why is Villette disagreeable?” He answers by saying, “Because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact, put into her book.” Is this a fair interpretation? Can you, from a novel such as this, make valid inferences about an author’s character or state of mind?
3. Harriet Martineau says that “the book is almost intolerably painful,” that “an atmosphere of pain hangs about the whole.” What produces this atmosphere of pain? The heroine’s disappointments ? Incidental imagery? Lucy Snowe’s view of life? Something metaphysical?
4. Many men have admired this novel. What is there in it for a man to admire?
For Further Reading
BIOGRAPHIES AND LETTERS
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. An extensive and comprehensive study of the Brontë family.
Bentley, Phyllis. The Brontës and Their World. New York: Viking Press, 1969. An illustrated biographical portrait of the Brontës.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. The Belgian Essays, edited by Sue Lonoff. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Essays the sisters wrote while studying at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, the model for Madame Beck’s school in Villette.
Brontë,
Charlotte, and Anne Brontë. Agnes Grey, with a Memoir of Her Sisters by Charlotte Brontë. New York: Penguin, 1988. Charlotte’s short memoir written to commemorate her sisters’ lives and careers is included in this edition of Anne Brontë’s novel.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. New York: Penguin, 1975. The first biography of Charlotte Brontë, written by her friend the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.
Gérin, Winifred. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. A compelling and well-researched biography.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. A lively and readable portrait of Charlotte Brontë and her world.
Shorter, Clement K. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle. 1896. West-port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970. A short biography that includes some interesting letters.
Smith, Margaret, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: Volumes I-III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995-2004. The standard scholarly edition of Brontë’s correspondence; expertly researched, with excellent notes. Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s memoir appears in volume II.
Spark, Muriel, ed. The Letters of the Brontës. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. A selection of Brontë letters.
CRITICISM
Alexander, Christine, and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A beautifully illustrated critical study of the Brontës’ art and the influence of visual culture on their writing.
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