Villette - Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë's lesser known novel is not substantially different from Jane Eyre in terms of quality and content; in fact, it is narratively extremely similar. An independent, middle class lady, Lucy Snowe, bereft of family, is forced to seek employment to sustain herself. Instead of becoming a governess (a profession deemed odious by Victorian standards), she decides to become a carer to an elderly invalid. When this endeavour fails with the death of her employer, Lucy travels to the Belgian town of Villette, modeled on Brussels, where she becomes an English teacher in a girl's school, or pensionnat. The book is heavily autobiographical in that it charts the experience of Brontë's own depressing teaching career. Lucy is a melancholy drip of a heroine suffering from clinical depression who falls in love with a young doctor, and later, her short tempered chauvinist colleague, M. Paul Emanuel. There is also a ghostly nun in the school's attic, again mirroring the tone and events of Jane Eyre. 

This novel is dreary with melancholia, sparse in the prison-like confines of the pensionnat (Lucy rarely ventures outside), and has a painfully slow beginning, however I did enjoy it in moderate doses. Towards the end, I was sufficiently interested in the plight of the characters to risk the health of my eyes by reading long into the night. Miss Snowe is infuriating and unlikable as a character; her clipped, sullen disposition, tendency towards emotional repression and masochistic hoarding of misery does little to dispose the reader to sympathy. The other characters are even less likable, yet Brontë has some measure of success in bringing Emanuel from a bullying, nasty piece of work to a hard-done-by, misunderstand romantic hero. There are a lot of biblical references that the book would have been stronger without, as well as far too much French requiring repeated visits to the endnotes for translation. The ending is purposefully frustrating and the mystery of the ghost unsatisfying. Please to ignore the amateurish graduate essay at the start of the Penguin edition which tries to link everything to slavery, a common problem in modern literary studies.

Rating: 3/5