Villette by Charlotte Bronte (1853)

A young Englishwoman goes to the Continent to teach at a girls' school in the city of Villette.

Book Review: Villette was the final novel written by Charlotte Bronte, and one of those works that I could (almost) write about for the same number of pages as the book itself. It's a mature novel: wise, measured, thoughtful, though all about the experiences of a young person. And who knew Villette was a city (a stand-in for Brussels), I thought it was the name of a person. You learn something new every third day.

Bronte disguises our heroine, Lucy Snowe, as an almost invisible narrator for the first three chapters. She is so diffident that it seems she will only be a minor and background character in her own story, always in the shadow of three main actors, all of whom reappear later in the book. In those pages we get a sense of Lucy as not quite fitting in, a fish out of water, even in her own home. But Bronte takes the concept a step further, sending Lucy from England to the Continent (Belgium) where she's an Anglophone among Francophones, a Protestant among Catholics, isolated, a stranger to local customs and culture. We also have a "love pentangle" to complicate her situation. But Lucy, despite her inner strength and passion, cannot put herself forward. She hides her feelings: "it was emotion, and I would rather have been scourged, than betrayed it." Her strength is in enduring, persevering, surviving. A strong woman. A Christian martyr (though a harsh judge). Abnegating. Self-denial and reserve: "daydreams are delusions of the demon." With this disability, Lucy contends with love interests that could not be more different: one almost heroic, the other mercurial, sometimes hateful. Bronte captures perfectly Lucy's psychology, her interior life, fears and hopes, which will be credible and understandable, indeed intoxicating, for many readers. Bronte plumbs the depths of depression: "thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind." But Lucy also tells her story in her own time and in her own way. Letting us know only what she wants us to know, when she wants us to know it. The caption "unreliable" is fair to use here.

Periodically, the antipathy toward Catholicism is jarring to the modern ear (Lucy Snowe has no love for "Romanism"), but seems to accurately reflect the attitudes and times, and wasn't off-putting. The character's (author's) attitudes toward Catholics is certainly more balanced here than in The Professor. Despite the occasional outlandish coincidence, my problems with Villette are largely personal. I'm finding (perhaps as a product of modern times) that lately I don't have sufficient patience for long books, and the plot was slower than an arthritic turtle. Actually, there was more exposition than plot. Most modern writing uses a few telling details to speak for the whole, but in Villette the whole speaks for the whole, as the story moves in a vast number of tiny increments. The effect is a kind of literary pointillism rather than the broad daubs of color we're familiar with today. I believe that if Bronte had cut maybe 200 pages from the book, it would be better remembered and loved today, as with some other Bronte works. Reminiscent for me in a way of Emma, also an excellent story with just too many pages. And as with Emma, the reader's enjoyment of Villette will depend wholly on how much the reader is captivated by and identifies with the protagonist, Lucy Snowe. Although Lucy (uneasily) dominates, there are other characters of interest: the charmingly exasperating Ginevra Fanshawe, the painfully exasperating M. Emanuel, the suspiciously exasperating Mme. Beck. Lucy's life is not easy. The story is broad, a romance, a coming of age story, a story of trial and perseverance, of women's roles, issues of religion, occasional echoes of her other books (many of The Professor), moments of Gothic horror, all wrapped in a single tale ripe for the pens of academics and the enjoyment of the solitary reader.  [4★]