Villette (2 page)

Reverend Brontë kept his children abreast of current events; among these were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in which the Duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte’s awareness of politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings’ saga
The Islanders
(1827), about an imaginary world peopled with the Brontë children’s real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as Charlotte’s chosen character.

Throughout her childhood, Charlotte had access to the circulating library at the nearby town of Keighley. She knew the Bible and read the works of Shakespeare, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, and she particularly admired William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. In 1831 and 1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.

In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year Charlotte finished her first novel,
The Professor,
but it was not accepted for publication. However, she began work on
Jane Eyre,
which was published in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety in the core of the story—the relationship between a middle-aged man and the young, naive governess who works for him—most reviewers praised the novel, helping to ensure its popularity. One of Charlotte’s literary heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote her a letter to express his enjoyment of the novel and to praise her writing style, as did the influential literary critic G. H. Lewes.

Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Brontë in 1848 and Anne in 1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary circles that included such luminaries as Thackeray, whom she met for the first time in 1849; his daughter described Brontë as “a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady.” In 1850 she met the noted British writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request of Reverend Brontë, later became her biographer. Charlotte’s novel
Villette
was published in 1853.

In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who worked with her father. Less than a year later, however, she fell seriously ill, perhaps with tuberculosis, and she died on March 31, 1855. At the time of her death, Charlotte Brontë was a celebrated author. The 1857 publication of her first novel,
The Professor,
and of Gaskell’s biography of her life only heightened her renown.

 

When Charlotte Brontë began writing
Villette,
her last novel, she was no longer hiding under the anonymous pen name of Currer Bell, the celebrated author of
Jane Eyre.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the daughter of novelist William Thackeray, recalled the first time she met the mysterious writer at a small soiree hosted by her father. “After a moment’s delay the door opens wide, and the two gentlemen come in leading a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, pale with fair straight hair and steady eyes.... She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness, our hearts are beating with wild excitement. This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have sent all London talking, reading, and speculating” (quoted in Smith, ed.,
The Letters of Charlotte Brontë,
vol. 2, p. 60; see “For Further Reading”). Much to Anne’s dismay, the evening would be largely disappointing. Although Charlotte Brontë looked the part of the demure heroines she so brilliantly imagined, she lacked their fiery spark. She refused to chat with the ladies, became embarrassed and awkward, and spent most of the evening cowering in a comer. Anne reported that her father was so bored that he slipped away before the night was over and went to his club. The quiet authoress may have been a literary genius, but she was not much of a public celebrity.

Lucy Snowe, the heroine of
Villette,
is equally wary of public presentations and displays. Cautious, determined, caustic, and passionate, Lucy is a study in contradictions, much like Brontë herself. In her innovative study
The Brontë Myth,
Lucasta Miller suggests that it has been difficult for scholars, biographers, and literary critics to separate the romanticized history of the doomed Brontë family from the thematic content of their literary works. Charlotte’s background has all the ingredients of a nineteenth-century novel: an absent mother; a serious, religious father; a semi-secluded life on the moors; a lively, creative childhood interrupted by the deprivations of boarding school (later immortalized in
Jane Eyre);
studying abroad in Brussels (the backdrop for
Villette
and the inspiration for The
Professor);
and sudden fame (with the publication of
Jane Eyre),
followed by a series of tragedies and disappointments. But unlike the 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).