Villette Read Free

mythic portrayal of her initiated by her first biographer, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë was not just the waifish, secluded visionary others imagined her to be.
    Critics’ responses to Villette and to its odd heroine varied widely. George Eliot read the book three times and thought it a masterpiece. The Literary Gazette found the story “infinitely delightful” and a worthy addition to Brontë’s growing oeuvre, remarking, “This book would have made her famous, had she not been so already. It retrieves all the ground she lost in Shirley and will engage a wider circle of admirers than Jane Eyre” (quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 718). Yet several readers, including Brontë’s friend Harriet Martineau, found the story’s passionate content troubling and Lucy’s conflicting desires dangerous. The provocative content of the novel led to unsettling comparisons between the heroine and her author. Martineau wrote, “The book is almost intolerably painful ... so incessant is the writer’s tendency to describe the need of being loved, that the heroine, who tells her own story, leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of having either entertained a double love, or allowed one to supercede another without notification of the transition” (Barker, p. 719).
    William Thackeray shared Martineau’s public opinion about the impropriety of the two romances in the novel. In his private remarks on Villette he made no distinction between Lucy Snowe’s experience and Bronte’s, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the author and her fictional creation and declaring, “it amuses me to read the author’s naive confession of being in love with two men at the same time.... The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely faced creature!” (Barker, p. 719).
    Written between January 1850 and the end of 1852, Villette is riddled with allusions to Brontë’s past. The town of Villette and the school where Lucy teaches are thought to be based on Brontë’s own tenure at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, where she developed a passion for the brilliant and unpredictable Monsieur Héger, the school’s principal. Héger is the model for Paul Emmanuel, Lucy’s second and more successful suitor in the novel. Lucy’s other love interest in the book, Dr. John Graham Bretton, is a double for Brontë’s publisher, George Smith. The disappointment of the courtship between Lucy and Dr. John in the novel mirrors Brontë’s failed romance with Smith, who ended up marrying a younger and prettier woman.
    While she was composing Villette, Brontë took several trips to London. With George Smith often by her side, she attended parties, lectures, and the theater, and visited art galleries and portrait studios. In 1850 he persuaded Brontë to have two portraits done. The first, a chalk drawing by George Richmond, captures Brontë’s large, lovely eyes, and re-imagines her broad features to create a flattering image that Brontë remarked looked more like her sister Anne. The other is a rare daguerreotype, an early photograph that displays Brontë’s strong, plain features, her dark hair gathered into a neat bun, her lips barely hinting at a smile.
    The haunting sensibility of Villette is related to Brontë’s experience of loss, both in her romantic life and within her family. Her brother, Branwell, died in 1848; Emily and Anne were gone by the summer of 1849. In September 1850, while she was writing the first sections of Villette, Brontë composed a biographical notice to justify the lives and works of her beloved sisters. She offered a sobering conclusion: “I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great” (Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell”; the essay appears in