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Charlotte Brontë (1816-1854), Villette (1853).
Lecture LT202
Dr. Susan Oliver
Sources and tips for research:
Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/
Victorian Studies (scholarly journal)
The Brontë Society and Parsonage Museum: http://www.bronte.org.uk/
The British Association for Victorian Studies: http://bavs.ac.uk/resources/web-resources/
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale Up, 2005).
Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1986)
45-49.
Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky, “Fantasies of National Identification in Villette,” in Studies
in English Literature1500-1900 49:4 (2009), 925-944.
Anne Longmuir, “’Reader, Perhaps You Were Never in Belgium?'”: Negotiating British Identity
in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 64:2 (2009)
163-188.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1996)
Lecture:
This week's text on Versions of Modernity is Charlotte Brontë's third and final novel Villette,
which was published in 1853, less than a year before Brontë's death from pneumonia. She died
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aged just 39, a month short of her fortieth birthday. That makes Villette a novel of the midVictorian period, and one in touch with soil and individual anxieties of that time. Queen Victoria,
by contrast with Brontë, lived a long life coming to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837 and
reigning until her death aged 81 in 1901). I mention that contrast to draw attention to some of the
advantages of privilege (although that is not the only reason for the longevity of Victoria - her
husband died young). As an Anglican clergyman’s family, the Brontës enjoyed some privilege
and were of the professional classes, but they were not economically well off.
Villette is an extraordinary novel. With a subjective, first person narrator, it's structure and the
literary devices used are very different from the third-person, all-knowing omniscient narrator
and sentimental, comedy-of-manners style that we looked at last week in Jane Austen's 1815
Bildungsroman, Emma. Villette is also a Bildungsroman, but it reacts to the Romantic novel and
Victorian realism whereas Emma was a response to eighteenth-century styles in fiction. Villette
is, like Brontë's more popularly known Jane Eyre, a fictional biography or memoir that tells the
story of its how it's protagonist narrator, Lucy Snowe, comes to terms with difficult
circumstances and personal trauma to make a life for herself. She does that in a world where
single women are disadvantaged in almost every aspect of their lives. I'll say more about that
struggle in due course, but for now let's talk about overall style and genres of modernity in
Villette.
Critics typically see Villette as having many of the features of the mid-nineteenth century realist
novel, but differing in many obvious and more subtle ways. On the realist front, it conforms to
expectation of style by exploring the struggle for existence and reality of working life for a
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young woman without means. The life opportunities available to plain and socio-economically
vulnerable Lucy Snowe are compared with the much better opportunities available to the
precocious and sensual Polly/Paulina and the beautiful and privileged Ginevra Fanshawe,
comparison which are typical of the realist tradition and its exploration of social problems of
inequality. There are male characters that are in positions of guardianship and care of the female
characters: most obviously, Graham or Dr. John, who is a moral and physical guardian figure and
the schoolteacher philosopher, Monsieur Paul. Graham / Dr. John is not only the character whom
Polly / Paulina and Ginevra Fanshawe seek to impress, but he is repeatedly shown to be
compromised and self-interested in terms of his motives. Lucy Snowe has more in common with
Monsieur Paul, but is denied the closure of marrying him. This not a novel that has Jane
Austen’s trademark closure of marriage.
Villette is a realist novel about social class and the condition of women. However, there are
obvious gothic and Romantic imaginative episodes that transcend realism and the everyday, and
they come thick and fast. The foregrounding of Lucy's thoughts and feelings, for instance, are
used to emphasize the gulf between her everyday routines of life and her alternative, expansive
imaginative existence. Leading feminist and psychoanalytical critic of Romantic and nineteenthcentury fiction, Mary Jacobus has read Villette as a novel in which vivid Gothic and Romantic
imagery is used by Brontë to mount a feminist critique of Victorian realism as a mode that
upholds male superiority and guardianship by rendering women vulnerable and childlike. Polly /
Paulina is always a version of the precocious, beguiling child - much like Adèle Varens in Jane
Eyre - while Ginevra Fanshawe is the beautiful adolescent of the verge of womanhood. Mary
Jacobus shows how Victorian realist fiction both emerged from and gave public representation to
a dominant patriarchal culture that associated women with the domestic sphere and debarred
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them from taking autonomous decisions about their own lives, encouraging them to be what men
most wanted or expected. Lucy Snowe has lost her entire family due to unexplained
circumstanced, so is not very marriageable in the middle-class society in which she lives as a
virtual pauper. She is precluded from the domestic world of women, just as she is a work-exile
from her home nation. Lucy’s counterpart in last week's Emma would be Jane Fairfax - an
intelligent and marginalized orphan who is destined to become a governess that lives frugally
and looks after other people's children unless she can marry. Lucy and Jane make interesting
comparisons, of anyone who wants further to explore that connection. Returning to Lucy Snowe,
her work as carer and companion for the elderly Miss Marchmont in her first job makes her
uncomfortably comparable with Emma's Miss Bates and Miss Marchmont’s death saves her from
life as a non-person. The tragedy that left Miss Marchmont single, unfulfilled and thwarted of
life opportunities, furthermore, is just one self-contained tale inside this novel that contains many
such tales. Gretchen Braun offers a nice analogy by suggesting that Villette reverses the structure
of character comparison that Austen uses in Emma - in Villette it is as if in Emma, the privileged,
clever and beautiful protagonist had been shifted away from the centre only to exist as a literary
foil by which the reader could explore the lives of Jane Fairfax or Miss Bates. In Chapter 14,
“The Fête,” Ginevra endlessly reminds Lucy of her (that is, Lucy’s) predicament that is laden
with negative verbs: "I suppose you are nobody's daughter, since you took care of little children
when you first came to Villette: you have no relations; you can't call yourself young at twentythree; you have no attractive accomplishments—no beauty. As to admirers, you hardly know
what they are; you can't even talk on the subject: you sit dumb when the other teachers quote
their conquests. I believe you never were in love, and never will be: you don't know the feeling,
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and so much the better, for though you might have your own heart broken, no living heart will
you ever break. Isn't it all true?"
Brontë's use of Gothic and Romantic aspects of Villette not only represents a re-emergence of
Romantic ideas about personal liberty and the freedom of the imagination to foreground the
conservative, reactionary aspect of Victorian society (where had Romanticism gone in a nation
preoccupied with class and making money?) but she also anticipates Freud's later nineteenth and
early twentieth century psychoanalytical work on the uncanny - the uncanny being something
familiar and meaningful from the past that re-emerges in strange ways. That, I suggest, is what
happens with Romanticism in Villette - it resurfaces in the form of a radical Victorian gothic that
ignites the potential of the imagination. Uncanniness runs thorough Villette, with characters
reappearing unexpectedly - the child Polly as the young adult Paulina, Graham disturbingly as
Doctor John - and also with repeated motifs and imagery. For example, the child Polly is
described early on in the novel as reclining like an odalisque at the feet of Graham. Lucy's
account of that sensual pose betrays her fascination with forbidden sensuality - a fascination that
resurfaces in her viewing of the Cleopatra painting in the chapter of that name. Dr. John
censure's Lucy's viewing of that painting as unsuitable because it excites "vividly the
imagination" in ways that he deems morally and physically unhealthy. Indeed, the conflation of
Graham with Dr. John serves to link moral and physical health in a critique of Victorian
patriarchal ideas about the necessity of controlling women's bodies and libidos as well as their
ideas about autonomy (such as choosing for themselves what they might look at).
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Braun points out that the phantom nun (effectively a schoolgirl’s ghost story within the novel)
and suggestions that Madame Walravens of Basse-Ville is not just an unpleasant old women but
a witch, are episodes in a symbolic framework of innovative, psychological realism. That
psychological realism is the literary vehicle for Brontë's scientifically informed and culturally
sensitive exploration of damaged consciousness—that of Lucy — in ways that radically
resituates how readers perceive an otherwise mundane bourgeois Victorian Realist milieu. In
other words, Villette serves to re-train readers out of complacency and bad habits - they are
encouraged, if you like, to look at the Cleopatra and to thrill to Vashti, the actress whose
passionate performance leads to the theatre catching fire. Villette mounts a critique of the
critically weak banality of mainstream Victorian literary style, as Brontë saw it, recovering and
reconstituting the dangerous enthusiasm and liberation of the imagination that were aims and
objectives of Romantic writing. (I like that idea that Villette both looks back to Romanticism and
anticipates symbolism, and modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, using Gothic and
the uncanny as its means of doing so.)
Lucy Hughes-Hallett captured the destabilizing effects of Brontë’s storytelling manner, writing
recently in the Guardian that Villette's "phantasmagorical set pieces alternate win passages of
minute psychological exploration,” with Brontë's prose style sweeping between "sardonic wit”
and humour and a disturbing, hallucinatory delineation of "desperate desire" that at times
manifests itself in an early anticipation of modernist stream-of-consciousness writing. Villette
places the status quo of seemingly cold, realist judgment (the heroine's name is, after all, Lucy
Snowe) in contrasts with the creative energy and heat latent in a suppressed passion that finds
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displaced outlets: the actress Vashti sets the theatre aflame, as Lucy watches enthralled; those of
you who read the set passage from this novel on Close Reading Skills last year will remember
Lucy's sensual description of the basket of exotic fruit that she is asked to take to Madame
Walravens in the mysterious Base-Ville, fruit which she is forbidden to eat but which becomes a
metaphor for the expression of desire that is not allowed young women like her and is offered as
a sacrifice to a decrepit system (again, you might compare that episode with Lucy’s viewing of
the Cleopatra in the chapter of that title and her fascination with Polly’s coquettish behaviour.
There is something deeply disturbing about Dr. John’s professional responsibility for the
dormitory of girls, tucked onto their virginal, but deathly white beds. Similarly, Madame Beck’s
role as the mistress of the girls bespeaks a hideous complicity.
I’ve said in each lecture that context is a necessary part of your studies in Versions of Modernity,
so now I would like to take an overview of the wider context of Villette. The Victorian period
was the time of the most rapid expansion of the British Empire and Commonwealth around the
globe, with the increase in trade bringing exotic produce, ideas and people back to Britain.
Slavery was formally abolished in 1839, after the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and six years after the
Slavery Abolition Act of 1933, but as with all instances of the abuse of human rights, the issue
was not a clear cut as it might seem. A novel such as Villette, with its exploration of the
condition of servitude of girls like Lucy Snowe, offered new ways of thinking about ongoing and
wider forms of slavery or its equivalence, where disadvantaged circumstances and vulnerability
bound people to exploitative situations. Madame Beck’s constant calling of “Mees Lucy” to run
errands bespeaks an abusive relationship in which inequalities of power render Lucy unable to
have a life of her own.
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The economic wealth brought in by the expansion of British trade, Imperialism and the
Commonwealth led to an exponential increase in the size both of Britain's middle-classes and of
its working-class labour force. The Condition of England novel by writers such as Elizabeth
Gaskell (Mary Barton and North and South are prime examples) and Dickens’s novels typically
look at those changing social relations and the problems faced by the poor. Meanwhile, rural life
in Britain stagnated to a considerable extent as the nation became more economically and
culturally urban, metropolitan, and international: Lucy leaves Bretton (a version of “Britain” that
implies an estranged homeliness in both its name and its nature) to go to London and then to
“Villette—the great capital of the great kingdom of Labassecour.” Villette, meaning “small
town” is the capital of a place with a name that means, pejoratively, “the farmyard.”
Labassecour is a fictional name for Belgium as a nation regarded by Britain then as still rather
rural and backward, while it of course had its own Empire (particularly in Africa). The names
Villette and Labassecour are as sardonically ironic as those places are a travesty of the idealized
rural environment of Lucy’s childhood. At the beginning of Villette, Lucy recalls that her visits
to her godmother’s (a fairy godmother’s we might wonder?) “resembled the sojourn of Christian
and Hopeful beside a certain pleasant stream, with "green trees on each bank, and meadows
beautified with lilies all the year round.” The reference is to John Bunyan’s novel of selfdiscovery and pilgrimage Pilgrims’ Progress, one of many such references throughout Villette
that are also concerned with religious belief (I’ll come back to that shortly). An idealized rural
past as a place for nostalgia does not mean that such a place ever existed as it is remembered.
Let’s recall Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second and subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth writes in the “Preface” that the initial spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling that
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leads to poetic creativity must go through reflection in later moments of tranquility. Through that
reflection, something approximating to the original powerful feeling can be experienced and
channeled into poetic thought. That act of recreation is not the same as the original experience. It
can never replicate it exactly, but the feeling that the event elicited is reconstructed. The novel
had taken over from poetry as the dominant literary genre by the middle of the nineteenth
century and we could argue that Lucy Snowe does something similar to Wordsworth in her act of
remembering the moments when her apparent childhood innocence ended: she recreates the
powerful feeling of homeliness and pastoral harmony during a time of extreme trauma that must
have caused her enormous anxiety (she had just lost her family). Her association of her
Godmother’s rural Bretton home furthermore accords with the idea of a golden age of pastoral
that Cultural materialist critic Raymond Williams describes in The Country and the City as a
fiction invented by every age. Let’s see how that works. Lucy does not attend to the decay of the
rural; rather, she remembers something that aligns with Romantic writing’s sense that the organic
countryside offers spiritual solace in times of hardship. Look at what she writes when she departs
from the deceased Miss Marchmont’s home for London, at the beginning of Chapter V (titled
using an appropriate organic natural metaphor, “Turning a New Leaf”):
“In spite of my solitude, my poverty, and my perplexity, my heart, nourished and nerved with the
vigour of a youth that had not yet counted twenty-three summers, beat light and not feebly. “ she
continues that it was well that she was not feeble, or “I should have trembled in that lonely walk,
which lay through still fields, and passed neither village nor farmhouse, nor cottage: I should
have quailed in the absence of moonlight, for it was by the leading of stars only I traced the dim
path; I should have quailed still more in the unwonted presence of that which to-night shone in
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the north, a moving mystery—the Aurora Borealis. But this solemn stranger influenced me
otherwise than through my fears. Some new power it seemed to bring. I drew in energy with the
keen, low breeze that blew on its path. A bold thought was sent to my mind; my mind was made
strong to receive it. "Leave this wilderness," it was said to me, "and go out hence."
Now compare that account of a lost pastoral with her description of the fete in Villette in the
chapter titled “Cloud”:
“In a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a
forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage; a region, not of trees
and shadow, but of strangest architectural wealth—of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk,
and sphinx: incredible to say, the wonders and the symbols of Egypt teemed throughout the park
of Villette.”
In both passages, the everyday is displaced by something exotic - arctic in the first instance and
tropical in the second. Both fit well with a culture intoxicated with imperialism and global
exploration. Both reveal not just excitement, but the vacation of homeliness for something that
destabilizing but mind-expanding. Both, in their references to enchantment draw attention to a
work that is concerned to reveal the fallacy of realism.
Victorians mostly either made money out of the Britain's Imperial expansion or became the
agents of making money for others. In 1851, the Great Exhibition in London had celebrated the
power of Britain over the great of the planet and its ability to bring all goods, culture and people
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under the umbrella of Victorian Britain’s rule. But despite the glamour of that mid-century
festivity, Charlotte Brontë, as the daughter of a clergyman in the North Yorkshire market town of
Haworth, had witnessed at first hand the hardship of everyday life in Britain, especially as it
existed outside the main centres of international trade and industry. There was still no social
security in Victorian Britain, so the loss of fortune, for whatever reason, was usually a
catastrophic life event. Those who became victims of socio-economic hardship were dependent
upon charity, whether that charity be formally administered through parishes or dispensed by
benevolent individuals. In terms of health and life expectancy, there was still little treatment for
disease and infection, with infant mortality and the deaths of women in childbirth an everyday
fact of life. The discovery of antibiotics was still more than half a century into the future. Lucy
Snowe, the protagonist and arguably the heroine of Villette, has lost her entire family through
events that are left unexplained. The main point is that she has fallen upon hard times and her
attempts to survive as decently as possible provide the Villette's main narrative drive. Her
estrangement is double: from family life and from her county of origin, making this a novel of
anxiety about displacement and the loss of home at a time when the family and family life were
being upheld as central to a woman's identify. In this respect, personal anxiety mirrors that
cultural uneasiness that accompanied a nation whose population was leaving in increasing
numbers to make its fortune in the Empire.
The mid-Victorian period - indeed, the whole Victorian period - was also a time of religious
anxiety. Britain was still a strongly Christian nation, with Protestantism centred on the Anglican
Church, the official Church of the Nation. In Britain at that time, there were in practice many
religions and forms of Christian worship. The Brontë family was of Irish Protestant origin, and
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was acutely aware of the conflict between a marginalized and discriminated-against Roman
Catholic community and the dominant, Protestant church (also a cause cultural and religious
division in Scotland - something too often forgotten). Religious difference is a focus for
problematic relations in Villette. Those relations are both personal and cultural. Set as it is in
Belgium and punctuated with passages in French, Villette foregrounds failures of understanding
between Protestantism (as a modern, British system of belief) and Roman Catholicism (as a
mysterious, gothically represented, old superstitious and cruel system ore closely aligned with
Europe). Roman Catholicism is most vividly represented not only in the convent school, but in
the decrepit figure of its Patron and supporter, Madame Walravens and her devoted old priest,
Père Silas. Villette is usually regarded as an anti-Catholic novel and it is difficult to read the
representation of Catholicism as anything other than pejorative. However, I would like to suggest
that we read the accounts of religious disparagement as symbolic of the cultural war of Empires
that was really more about trade and influence.
****
Gretchen Braun’s reading stresses how nineteenth-century Protestant culture in Britain held
marriage and motherhood in high esteem, with the notion that marriage was “made in heaven”
often explicitly undergirding the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. That is why so
many of novels end with a suitable marriage. Motherhood is also a responsibility that comes
under scrutiny, with good and bad mothers compared with usually negligent or cruel step
mothers. All of this in a society where the death of women in childbirth led to a high incidence of
step-parents and carers from the extended family. Nineteenth-century novels are notable for their
treatment of motherless girls or orphans trying to make their way in the world. Emma, from last
week, can hardly remember her mother and her governess have recently left her to marry. Lucy
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Snowe is orphaned. Whereas Emma does not use Gothic imagery to any extent, the Gothic trope
of the orphan is a set piece in Brontë’s fiction. Jane Eyre, like Lucy, is a vulnerable orphan. If
you have been to the Brontë’s Parsonage at Haworth, you’ll appreciate the family home’s
position adjoining a graveyard in which many of the memorial stones record the early deaths of
women and children. Polly / Paulina quickly sees the way to seize an advantage for herself,
detaching herself from her father to form a sexualized attachment to Graham. But as Braun
points out, what makes Lucy’s story so different from the story of literary peers like Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Margaret in North and South, Mary Barton in the novel of that name, Charles
Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s own earlier Jane Eyre, is
that the protagonist remains friendless and obscure at the novel’s close. Villette does not provide
any validating closure for Lucy, at least not in the terms novel-readers have learned to expect:
there is no wedding, no substantial inheritance, and no significant public achievement. What
there is, however, is an account of her final achievement of independence. We are not told what
has happened to Monsieur Paul, but the inference is that he has died at sea - another reference to
the dangers of young men leaving their home nation in the process of Empire if read from a
realist perspective; or a symbolic act of poignant liberation if understood symbolically in relation
to his position of power over Lucy. Look at how the ending of Villette differs from the famous
“Reader, I married him” of Jane Eyre, from six years earlier: the address to the reader is there,
suggesting a confidential, secular confession: “M. Emanuel was away three years. Reader, they
were the three happiest years of my life.” Those and the final lines seem to suggest hope. A
positive feminist reading might celebrate the act of liberation, but Lucy says those years - now
past - were the happiest of her life, implying that afterwards her happiness takes a downturn. We
can usefully compare the ensuing hollow cheeriness of Villette’s final lines with the ending of
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Emily Brontë’s Withering Heights, where the narrator Mr. Lockwood points out that the earth in
which Heathcliff and Catherine are buried would hardly, of its own accord, suggest unquiet
slumbers. As a reminder, here is how Villette ends:
“Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to
conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of
rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let
them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas;
Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.”
I’d like to end with a consideration of the treatment of British and European identity in Villette.
It is well known that British nationalist discourse constructed Englishness in strong opposition to
the French. The historian Linda Colley makes that point particularly strongly in Britons and it is
borne out in numerous novels and poems. Looking at texts from our own module, in Austen’s
Emma, written and published in the immediately post-Waterloo months, the duplicitous and selfinterested Frank Churchill is evidence of the supposed corruption of French morals. His name,
Frank, suggests "Frenchness" and he has visited France. He undermines almost every expectation
by the conservative establishment of honesty in a man of his position and acquired means. Mrs.
Elton’s sister has a carriage that is of French design: the Barouche-Landau in which she fails to
turn up at the Box Hill picnic. In both of those instances, Frenchness is associated with luxury
and those characters are both morally questionable. Although Villette is set in Belgium, albeit
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under a fictional name, it contains a steady stream of passages in French. Some critics have read
the novel as Xenophobic, but I want to suggest that a more appropriate and sophisticated reading
is necessary. Several of the characters are the products of a complex mixed ethnicity: Polly’s
father “came, it seems, of mixed French and Scottish origin” and she exults that “We are Home
and de Bassompierre, Caledonian and Gallic.” Graham has a Celtic rather than English
appearance, with red hair and a freckled complexion. These points are regularly noted by critics,
but are they negative in tone or do they argue for a cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism? Kate
Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky point out that as “an Englishwoman living on the Continent, an
expatriate teaching English in a school regulated by Continental norms and a Roman Catholic
ethos” Lucy initially understands “herself as fundamentally opposed to this ethos . . .
enunciating a devastating critique of the Catholic, Continental world as duplicitous, enslaving,
and extreme (925).” Lucy’s description of Madame Beck as “looking “like a little Bonaparte in a
mouse-coloured silk gown” is far from positive in its tone. The suggestion that Villette re-enacts
or perpetuates the Battle of Waterloo does not quite hold, I suggest. Tom Nairn’s reading of the
pathology of nationalism supports a different interpretation. Nairn argues that the idea of
nationhood links imagination to medical discourses pertaining to neurosis - a powerful, symbolic
theme throughout Villette. The use of imagination as a diagnostic tool helps us to makes sense of
Brontë’s apparently nationalist narrative, fraught as it is with traumas of loss and identity crisis.
Ultimately, Lucy has to make her peace and live in a world where Madame Beck can prosper
“all the days of her life,” along with Père Silas, and where Madame Walravens is revealed not to
be a witch but a woman who can live out her life to the age of ninety.
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Document Author:
Longmuir, Anne
Title: 'Reader, Perhaps You Were Never in Belgium?': Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte
Brontë's The Professor and Villette.
Publication Details:
Nineteenth-Century Literature , (64:2), 2009, 163-188. (English
summary.) .
The module so far.
We've read Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads, in which narrative
and lyric - story, feeling and contemplation of ideas - were brought together in new ways
developed out of older, traditional poetic forms (the ballad). Then we read Jane Austen's Emma,
which developed the eighteenth-century form of the novel, often epistolary and about the lives of
named characters, into a form of writing that addressed the transition from girlhood into maturity
as a matter of coming to self-know,edge and an understanding of the wider world of other
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people. Wordsworth and Coleridge privileged ordinary people - the poor, the unfortunate and
sometimes the despised - as they struggled with life's events. Lyrical Ballads elevates those
people, making their lives extraordinary and relevant to the condition of being human. Poems
such as Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey privilege the poet and the experiences of
his own life as the way to a profound understanding of the human condition put into perspective
by nature. Emma turned towards the minor gentry, landed classes and their circle of friends.
Austen explores their role in a society in which town and country need to move forwards with
understanding and moral responsibility. Her heroine comes to understand, accept and develop
her ability to shape society though example and influence, which is also presented as a means of
fulfillment. Emma and Mr. Knightley and Harriet and Robert Martin are key players in the future
of the nation. In Villette we return to a protagonist who is in a position of misfortune rather than
privilege. As Gretchen Braun has pointed out, there is a useful comparison to be made with
Emma. Lucy Snowe in Villette is plain and poor. She has to work to make her living, firstly as a
companion to an elderly woman, Miss Marchmont, then as a teacher in a girls school is one
cannot overstate the significance of the way these bright beauties are made foils to plain, poor
Lucy. . . . if Emma exists to deepen our understanding of miss Bates and Jane fairfax.
(199)
- six years after Jane Eyre (1847) and four years after Shirley: an Tale (1849). Charlotte Brontë
would go on to publish a further novel, The Professor: a Tale four years later in 1857. She also
wrote poems and other short fiction, as well as letters and and a journal.
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Charlotte Brontë was the third daughter of A goo an clergyman, the Revered Patrick Brontë and
his wife Maria. She is the eldest of the literary Brontë's, with Emily being born two years later in
1818 and Anne in 1820. Her brother Branwell, close to his sisters and a major influence on their
work, was born in 1817 and therefore a year after Charlotte. The two eldest sisters died at the
Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge,