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    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)
    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)
    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)
    Ebook723 pages8 hours

    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)

    By Charlotte Bronte

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    A reworking of “The Professor”, the author’s first novel, “Villette” is Charlotte Bronte’s fourth and last novel which is loosely based upon her own experiences at a boarding school in Brussels. The work follows the life of Lucy Snowe, a quiet yet self-reliant young girl without any family, from her life in the English countryside where she lives with her Godmother, to London, and finally to the French town of Villette, where she gains employment as a nanny at a boarding school. While there she is reunited with old acquaintances and meets the quick-tempered professor M. Paul Emanuel. The two eventually fall in love but seem destined to be kept apart by persons conspiring against them. “Villette” has gained a reputation as a gothic novel owing to several strange encounters Lucy has with a nun which may be the ghost of a woman who was put to death on the school’s grounds for breaking her vow of chastity. These strange visions give an appropriate atmosphere to a novel whose theme is one of loneliness and isolation. While not as popular as “Jane Eyre”, Bronte’s “Villette” is a work which arguably exceeds in literary standing her more famous work. This edition includes an introduction by Mary Augusta Ward and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateDec 26, 2017
    ISBN9781420956863
    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)
    Author

    Charlotte Bronte

    Charlotte Brontë, born in 1816, was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters, and one of the nineteenth century's greatest novelists. She is the author of Villette, The Professor, several collections of poetry, and Jane Eyre, one of English literature's most beloved classics. She died in 1855.

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    Reviews for Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward)

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    • 3/5
      I found it a rather slow read. Parts were in untranslated French, which I couldn't understand. Other than going off to Vilette Lucy was very passive. She just watched what was going on around her. Because she held so much back it was hard to care about her. Her romance with M. Paul seemed jarring. Suddenly once he is leaving she loves him. Up till than it didn't seem like she even really liked him and he wasn't very likeable.
    • 1/5
      I read where Villette was the ruination of Charlotte Bronte's career, and I can understand why. The story is disjointed and difficult to follow. It may be difficult to follow if one doesn't know a great deal of conversational French, as entire paragraphs are written in French. Just terrible!
    • 4/5
      A few thoughts:- Villette didn’t capture my imagination as either [Shirley] or [Jane Eyre].- I never really warmed up to the heroine Lucy Snowe (no pun intended) - she fascinated me, but not enough.- Liked the gothic elements which created an eerie feeling throughout the novel - the appearence of a ghost - a white nun….- Liked also the descriptions of Lucy’s loneliness and despair and her deliberate attempts to be an independent free spirit.
    • 3/5
      SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THIS REVIEWTL;DR: There are a few things I liked about this book, but overall, to me, this is an instance where changing times and mores have rendered earlier centuries’ attitudes too distasteful to be ignored. I liked the main character. Miss Snowe is clever, resourceful, and knows what she wants (even if her ambitions are low). Her snarkiness plays a big role in her charm. She’s a wonderfully complex character. There were enough interesting musings and general bird’s-eye views on life mixed in with the text, too. It drags in places, but overall the narrative maintains a pleasant momentum. However. The attitudes espoused in the book and held up by the characters as “how things ought to be” I found too distasteful to overlook: there’s aggressive patriarchal abuse, there’s sanctimonious posturing with religious credentials, and there’s colonial-style racism aplenty. They may make the text a rich field to explore intellectually, but they annoyed much of the reading pleasure out of me. First, there’s the gender issues. Viewed as a romance novel, Villette presents the main character, introverted expat teacher Lucy Snowe, with the choice between two love interests. One is an ideal (English)man, whose ideal spouse is one who is his intellectual partner. And on the other hand there is M. Emanuel, a domineering, exacting brute with frightening anger management issues and temper tantrums, who will not tolerate contradiction or even imagined disobedience. His ideal woman is one who obeys him absolutely (an arch eyebrow will trigger a “know your place, woman” speech), who immerses herself in him, lives up to his exacting yet unspoken standards, and who successfully navigates his moving-the-goalposts scrutiny. Spoiler: This is the one Miss Snowe ends up choosing.Brontë “redeems” M. Emanuel in true battered-woman form: his exactitude, tyranny and temper tantrums merely stem from genuine, full-on passion and honesty, dontcha see? That’s just who he is. Also, he’s been hurt before: doesn’t that earn him indulgence and compassion? That time he scolded her for wearing clothes that weren’t mouse-grey and wildly (and knowingly) exaggerated their showiness because even a mild “transgression” is a transgression? That’s not domineering, it just shows you he cares. His constantly lording his academic superiority over her, well he only means the best for her, and his expectations are high! Don’t you see that he needs to test her, to be sure she’ll live up to his standards? It’s for her own good. Really, he means well. That time he showed her some much-needed affection and then went completely incommunicado for two weeks, well, that was necessary because he was preparing a surprise, and he would not be able to keep it from her if she subjected him to her sincere and irresistible feminine questions. So you see, it really was her own fault. Also, her emotional despair during the interval is irrelevant, this really was about his emotions.Lucy Snowe (and the reader) is not to notice the systematic pattern of denigration and abuse. We are invited to see him as a poor, suffering victim who needs fixing by a special woman who can see the real person underneath the abuse and tyranny. This is where the religious hypocrisy comes in: M. Emanuel is, after all, a very pious man -- surely that will vouch for his decency?Much is made of Emanuel’s strongly held Roman Catholicism: to illustrate that, it is revealed that he has been spending his last twenty years in self-imposed mortification, near-poverty and deprivation, in order to benefit people who kinda sorta wronged him. Brontë presents that as laudable and redeem-worthy because isn’t he just sooo pious? I thought it was merely perverse, a case of ostentatious and downright pathological Catholic guilt taken to extremes. Especially because the revelation about his mortification is presented to the reader as an invitation to reconsider the quality of his character: it takes principles and lofty morality and strength of resolve to commit to this course of action. Well, no. To me, this turns the whole affair into a case of ostentatious flagellation, designed to trigger goodwill: showy Catholic suffering used as emotional manipulation while pretending to high morality. Somebody is suffering beyond necessity; therefore the issue deep and admirable and worthwhile. No, it really, really isn’t. (It is true that it is Brontë who sets it up like this, but in-universe it is M. Emanuel who expects the revelation to change Miss Snowe’s opinion of him, too.)And finally, there is the racism. The main cast consists mostly of smug, impossibly arrogant English expats looking down on both the locals and the immigrants -- except other Englishmen, and the occasional Frenchman, who, after all, represents a prestigious and long-standing High Culture. They are so smug they do not realize they are immigrants too -- and do not realize their smugness. The native people of Labassecour/Belgium are generally described as too rural, ugly and stupid to merit any interest, except for a few of the ones who’ve mastered enough French to not sound like a local. Anyone who’s worth noticing is either a French or an English expat/immigrant; even the indigenous royalty, nobility and bourgeoisie is dismissed haughtily, not to be taken seriously as company or one’s intellectual equals. (Disclaimer: I myself am Belgian.)It’s not as though these issues are mainly located in the background as (well, the racism is, usually): the patriarchal abuse is held up front and center, and the main focus of the book, and this made it too hard for me to give the book the benefit of the doubt. The fact that pretentious religious posturing is presented as a redeeming factor did not help.
    • 3/5
       I liked this book in the beginning: the set up, getting familiar with the characters, etc. Then all the characters except the narrator abruptly dissapeared.That would be fine except for the fact that the author had really given me no reason at all to care about the narrator up to this point. In fact, I thought that another character named Polly was the one that we were supposed to focus on (I also liked her best). For me, a huge part of any book is the characters, especially the main character. If I don’t like the main character, the book is basically sunk. In this case, I didn’t care about the main character, perhaps because there was so little revealed about her.It got a little better once I adjusted, but it didn’t really pick up for me until the last 50 or so pages, at which point I found it difficult to put the book down. So that’s good, but I’m not sure that those 50 pages can entirely make up for the fact that the plot was SO SLOW to develop. I wasn't even sure what the real plot was supposed to be until I was more than halfway through the book.It probably also didn’t help that I didn’t particularly care for a certain character that I’m sure I was supposed to like by the end. Nor did it help that I can’t speak a word of French (little bits of it pop up frequently, usually in dialogue). And it especially didn’t help that my dislike of the main character was exacerbated when she started acting ethnocentric, putting forth a somewhat stereotypical view of the French and taking quite a few jabs at Catholicism throughout.
    • 3/5
      Unlike 'Jane Eyre', I felt this novel was more 'uncanny', as if there was an air of mystery from the start, in the narrative. It is a tale of learning from experience and maturity, yet it read less well than 'Jane Eyre'. Lucy has less character than Jane, and she is led by her emotions, but, unlike Jane, she does not have an ounce of anger or willfulness in her. In this, I found her less attractive. The town of Villette feels like its own microcosm, with a strong sense of displacement, as if it was the 'Twilight Zone'. If this is what nineteenth-century English people thought about French villages, well, I feel sorry for them, as, like in 'The Avengers' TV series (with its weird village locals and village greens, or 'evil' lords and hellfire clubs), this is just a construct of their imagination and characters can be distorted as to make them look unnatural. In this, I think I will leave this book be and read other works - it felt too weird to be enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      There are so many things to like about Charlotte Bronte's "Villette" and yet I can't say I truly loved this book. It's particularly interesting since the book in so many ways parallels Bronte's own life while she was living in Belgium. This is probably interested me the most, having read a biography about Bronte earlier this year.The heroine of "Villette" is Lucy Snowe, a somewhat cold, but determined woman who is left to find her own fortune in the world and travels to Villette to (eventually) become an English teacher. As a narrator, she rarely tells what she knows -- or the entirety of her thoughts-- so it's up to the reader to tease them out from what she does say. There are various instances of unrequited love woven throughout the book. Of course, comparisons to Bronte's more famous "Jane Eyre" are inevitable. Lucy Snowe is a much more realistic character-- much more well-rounded and without that inherent goodness that causes Jane to grate a bit. However, "Villette" seems to drag on more... little happens and Lucy Snowe is generally so reserved that it is hard to connect with any of the characters, including the narrator herself.While I liked "Villette" overall, it definitely doesn't displace "Jane Eyre" as my favorite Charlotte Bronte book.
    • 5/5
      I tried reading Villette once, a number of years ago. I got about halfway through and stopped; maybe I wasn’t old enough to appreciate it very much. About a year and a half ago, when I moved into my apartment, I came across my copy and threw it on TBR Mountain, “to read sometime in the future.”Villette, as is Jane Eyre, is based on personal experience: Charlotte Bronte famously spent a year teaching English in Brussels. The novel is set in the fictional country of Labassecours, based on Belgium (at first I thought the setting of the book was some extension of Angria, the kingdom she and her siblings created when they were children). Lucy Snowe comes to Villette from England in search of a job and almost accidentally ends up at the door of Madame Beck’s pensione, or school for young ladies, where she initially gets a job as nursemaid and then teacher.Lucy is an introverted, isolated, sarcastic heroine; she is extremely practical but not good at showing emotion. In fact, I think she’d rather just pretend she doesn’t have them. In addition, she mocks her “friends” mercilessly. All told, I found her completely relatable, even though she’s not the classical example of a perfect heroine. The back of the book promises two relationships: one with a doctor who frequents the pensione and the other with an irascible, emotional teacher. The relationship with Dr. Bretton fizzles out; Lucy’s feelings for him mellow with time and fade out with loss of contact. Her relationship with M. Paul Emmanuel is far more interesting because Lucy herself doesn’t realize her feelings. But Bronte is good at showing the reader how Lucy feels, which means that Lucy is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. But I like her flaws; they make her much for relatable, especially since I see a lot of myself in Lucy. I liked, or appreciated, her struggle to be independent.Some of the plot elements fall flat (the ghost story is disappointing), and Bronte has an annoying habit of introducing her characters without actually referring to them by name for a couple of sentences. But overall I loved this book. Considering how much I love Jane Eyre, it’s amazing that I couldn’t get into Villette the first time I tried it. JE is a good introduction to Charlotte Bronte’s novels, but Villette is well worth a read.
    • 5/5
      Lucy Snowe is an orphaned girl who finds herself taking a job as an instructor at a French boarding school in the town of Villette. Throughout the course of the novel we’re introduced to a wide selection of characters: the spoiled young Polly, handsome Dr. John, Lucy’s cruel employer Madame Beck and her nephew the cranky professor M. Paul Emanuel, the insufferable coquette Ginerva Fanshawe and more. This novel is famous in literary circles because of the illusive heroine. Lucy keeps secret from the reader and never lets us completely into her world. There’s so much we don’t know about her and at times that can be frustrating, but I do love her acerbic nature. She’s often short or condescending; she sometimes calls people out on their bad choices in love or challenges them in other ways. Lucy is beyond interesting. I also love the fact that her job is important to her and that throughout the book the pursuit of education is valued. Lucy’s character reminds me so much of Esther from Bleak House. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I read both books in the same year, but it’s not just that. Both women are quiet and reserved, never giving the reader a complete picture of who they are. Both are instrumental in getting to close friends together, both fall for someone, but assume they can’t ever be together for one reason or another. I just kept having flashbacks. I checked the dates and the books were actually published in the same year, though Dickens’ was serialized the year before. I doubt either author was aware of the other’s novel when they were writing their own. In so many ways I can understand why Villette is considered Charlotte’s masterpiece. The characters and their relationships are much more complicated and the tone is much darker. I also think the writing is exquisite, even better than in her earlier work. Villette really was way ahead of its time. But I will also say it didn’t impact me in the same way that Jane Eyre did and I think a big part of that is my own personality. Most of the people I know who have loved Villette more than Jane Eyre identify with Lucy in a very personal way. They are usually quieter, more introspective and reserved and that’s just not me. I’m a bit of a chatterbox and I tend to be incredibly social. I do love being at home alone and curling up with a good book, but I like being out and about with my friends just as much. So it was harder for me to connect with Lucy. It’s not that Jane Eyre is Miss Social Butterfly, but she does stand up for herself and she’s a bit of a rebel. I love her open dialogue with the reader. I felt like I knew her in a way that I never did with Lucy. I missed the humor you find in Jane Eyre. I felt like the chemistry between Jane and Mr. Rochester was palpable and I never felt that way with Lucy and either of her love interests. I also couldn’t connect with the all-encompassing loneliness that plagued Lucy. I think it’s unfair to judge this book entirely in comparison to Jane Eyre, but I can’t help myself. I couldn’t seem to stop. I think Villette really embodied the pain Charlotte was going through at that time. It was the last novel she completed and at that point all of her sisters had died. She was alone and heartbroken and that darkness seeped into her writing. SPOILERSThe ending totally took me by surprise. I know some people say it’s ambiguous, but to me it was pretty clear (maybe that makes me pessimistic). I couldn’t help thinking WTF on that last page. It’s not that the writing wasn’t beautiful or fitting, but still I felt like I was punched in the stomach. I wanted Lucy to have a bit of happiness in the second half of her life and I felt like she was so close but never quite got it. Her happiest years were those anticipating the life she was never able to have with M. Paul Emanuel; that broke my heart. SPOILERS OVERBOTTOM LINE: It’s a must for anyone who loves the Bronte sisters or Victorian classics. It didn’t trump Jane Eyre as my personal favorite, but it’s a more challenging book in many ways and one that I know I’ll reread in the future. “If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep-inflicted lacerations never heal-cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge-so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo; caressing kindnesses-loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.” 
    • 5/5
      Virginia Woolf considered Villette Bronte’s “finest novel” and George Eliot preferred it to Jane Eyre. The friend who recommended it to me feels that way too, and in her review on Goodreads called it a “a beautifully constructed novel, with a complex and often frustrating narrator and quite possibly the most elegant, restrained examination of unrequited love that I have read.” I’d agree with that assessment, even if Jane Eyre remains first in my affections, possibly because Jane Eyre is an old friend, possibly because it’s the more romantic, warming book--even if Villette is arguably the better, more mature book. Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Villette her last. If I weren’t comparing it to such a beloved book I’d give Villette five stars--I’d give it 4.99 stars were that possible. The prose often elicited writer’s envy in me because of its beauty and piercing insight. Its protagonist and narrator Lucy Snowe is self-effacing, reserved, my friend even describes her as “repressed” and at first she seemed to me as chilly as her name, and in the pitilessness and sharpness of her judgements it seemed to me she would be an uncomfortable companion--but she did grow on me. As did Professor Paul Emanuel--he reminded me a lot of Severus Snape of Harry Potter, and I can’t help but wonder if he influenced that character given the rather rare name of “Ginevra” appears in both works suggesting Rowling was familiar with the novel. Madame Beck is quite the character too. Few 19th century novels have a woman character quite so pragmatic, capable and unsentimental. That said this might not be for everyone. This is a typical Victorian novel in oh so many ways. I never, ever found it a slog, but some reviewers complained of its leisurely pace and of being overly descriptive, and that “nothing happens.” None of that ever bothered me, because to the extent those criticisms are just they are as much strengths as flaws. The story is very interior, very concerned with the small intricacies of character and relationships and the mind and heart of Lucy Snowe and others, but it’s psychologically complex and brilliantly insightful and often very vivid in its pictures of people. A few things did annoy me, though not enough to lower the novel in my estimation. First, this is partly autobiographical, because though Bronte uses the fictional name of “Villette” for the city and the fictional name of “Labassecour” for the kingdom, this is obviously set in the French-speaking Brussels, Belgium where Bronte studied and taught in a boarding school. And she makes little accommodation for non-French speakers. There are frequent passages of untranslated French in the novel--in my edition they’re translated in the endnotes, but it was irksome to go back and forth--it interrupted the flow. I’d search for an edition where the translations appear in either parenthesis in the text or footnotes--assuming you don’t know French. Another aspect I found annoying was the unrelenting anti-Catholicism of the novel. I’m an atheist but I was raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools, and I admit I’m none too fond of the kind of person who refers to it as “Papism” or “Popery” or “Romanism,” sees Jesuits as sinister, and thinks Protestantism is oh-so-much-more enlightened the way Lucy Snowe (and Bronte?) does here. And finally, like many 19th Century writers such as Hugo and Dickens, Bronte seemingly doesn’t see unlikely coincidences as a plotting flaw--indeed I suspect those writers see such instances as the Hand of God given how they resort to them--but as a 21st Century reader I can’t help but find that aspect eye-rolling. That said, I can’t stress enough what a wonderful, readable novel Villette is--heartbreaking, so be warned--but oh so very well worth knowing.Another warning--if you have the edition with the introduction including an interview with A.S. Byatt, don't read that introduction until afterwards--you'll hit major spoilers within paragraphs.
    • 4/5
      Although Charlotte Bronte is probably best known for Jane Eyre, many people consider Villette her best novel. There are definitely many similarities between the two. The heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe is also an orphan who shares many of Jane's best qualities - she's intelligent, fiercely independent, and self-reliant. After having a difficult life in England, Lucy goes to France to teach English at a boarding school. Much of the plot of the novel is similar to Jane Eyre - Lucy works hard against difficult odds, she falls in love with a man, who comes across as rude and difficult initially, and there is even a bit of gothic mystery with possible sightings of the ghost of a murdered nun. But how these two stories differ is in the inner characteristics of the two heroines. Jane is upbeat and confident and never shows a bit of weakness. Whereas Lucy, on the exterior, appears strong and confident, much of the story revolves around Lucy's sadness and depression over her life - being alone and unloved. The writing of the story is excellent and the mood is often dark and somber. Although this may be a better written novel, the mood is often morose and dark.
    • 4/5
      I had two problems with this book: the untranslated sections of French, to which the remnants of my schoolgirl French were often unequal, and the anti-Catholic propaganda. Other than that, I enjoyed the book.
    • 5/5
      Considered Charlotte Brontë's most autobiographical novel, Villette follows the story of Lucy Snow, perhaps one of the most self-contained heroines in all of nineteenth-century literature. Penniless and alone in the world, Lucy pursues her fortune abroad, teaching at a girls' school in the French city of Villette. Her experiences there, her encounters with both her fellow countrymen and the French natives of the city in which she has settled, and the relations she forms with her colleagues and students, are all chronicled in this gradually unfolding character study.Readers expecting something more along the lines of Jane Eyre, with its strong narrative flow, will be somewhat disappointed, I believe. Villette is a far more cerebral text, less plot-driven than is it character-centric. This has both advantages and disadvantages, in that it allows Brontë to plumb the psychological depths of her heroine in a way not seen in her earlier work, but also causes the story to drag somewhat, especially in the middle sections. Highly principled, somewhat prejudiced, and terribly lonely, Lucy Snow has always struck me as a flawed, more human version of Jane Eyre. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that she is what Jane would be, in the absence of hope. Her unrequited (possibly?) love for M. Paul, who is himself a deeply flawed individual, has something of the strength of despair in it at times, and the novel in general has a darker tone.As an aside, I should mention that Villette has numerous, and sometimes extensive, passages in French. The reader who is unacquainted with that language would do well to obtain a version in which translations are given in the rear notes.
    • 5/5
      I understood Lucy and her plight, from her loneliness and aloneness to her irrational impulse to get up and flee from what she wants. If not out loud, I was mentally coaxing her to "Just DO such-and-such! Go for it! Who cares what those other folks think? Who are they, anyway?"--all the while understanding why she wouldn't do as I coaxed and realizing the probability that, if I was in her position, I might not do as I coaxed either. (Ha! Show us ourselves, Brontë, and we'll accordingly see where and how we can become something better.)I don't know if it was the author's intention to make anything "cute" about her characters, but her style of writing often breeds cuteness in the characters and their relations with one another. Lucy and M. Paul grow into such a cute pair, likely, I think, already stuck on each other long before they recognize it, or at least long before Lucy does.Toward the end of the novel, I began reading in a passionate rush, the climax goading me forward faster than I moved through the majority of the story, even drawing an audible groan or something akin to a vindictive growl from me at one point (though I had to check it, since I was reading in a public place at the time.) Earlier details which could easily have been arbitrary turned out not to be, as a purpose was ultimately brought out of these details. Throughout the book, I was pleased by Brontë's ability to surprise me, to handle the character development, the plot, and the execution in ways I would not have foreseen. Sometimes I thought her choices strange; but then, who wants to read a book for which you can accurately predetermine every turn the plot will take and exactly how the characters will be in every respect? That wouldn't leave much of a need for the author's work or imagination--you could have just written the book yourself and saved the trouble of procuring it from elsewhere. Hence, the "strange" choices served to strengthen the book as a whole, and while I would have assumed there'd be a need for me to rate this book below Jane Eyre, now a favorite novel of mine that would be hard to match, saying this book didn't amaze me wouldn't be an accurate statement. I appreciate it differently than Brontë's most popular novel, but not unequally. A wonderful read!
    • 5/5
      Villette was the first Charlotte Brontë (or any Brontë sister) novel that I read. I was told it is a lot less popular and a lot darker than Jane Eyre. But the darkness of the book is what made me absolutely love it. That and its narrator.Lucy Snowe is the definition of an unreliable narrator, with her manipulations and lacunae, but who doesn't love to distrust a narrator? She, as a narrator, is what makes this novel fascinating. Though she is melancholy and pained as a character and seems to never step up and act or stand up for herself when it counts, she is skillful and witty in her story telling. She lies to you and tells you she's doing it, she keeps things from you sometimes without you realizing it, and she intentionally refuses to tell you major pieces of the plot and her life. It definitely makes for a unique read and keeps the reader trying to figure her out from page one until the end.But the dark and depressing parts of Lucy, and of the plot, are very well-written as well. For me, her story was relatable and inspired sympathy. I really came to love and root for Brontë's narrator, even if the author herself despised the young woman.
    • 4/5
      Villette is the semi autobiographical story of Lucy Snowe, a young woman of 23 who travels to Villette, a fictional town but modeled after Brussels, Belgium, where the author and her sister did travel for teaching positions. Ms Snowe does not know French, travels alone and is fortunate to find a position as a teacher in a boarding school because she speaks English. While traveling she befriends a young, shallow woman by the name of Ginevra Fanshawe, reunites with her Godmother and her son and becomes friends with M. Paul Carlos David Emanuel. She also runs into a former acquaintance named Polly, a serious young woman of high virtue. This is a Gothic romance and there are spectres of a nun and love that is met with adversity. Themes include the clash of protestantism and catholicism and gender roles and isolation.
      This is the author's third novel, the first being Jane Eyre. The first is probably a better story in scope but this novel is enjoyable, the protagonist has many admirable characteristics and the men in the book are generally of good qualities. This novel was criticized at the time for not being suitably feminine in portraying Lucy Snowe, therefore I think the author was successful in getting her social commentary on the life of single women in Victorian England heard.
    • 5/5
      In the introduction to the second volume of Absolute Sandman, Alisa Kwitney defined literature as fiction that creates "a taste for itself" rather than simply satisfying pre-existing tastes.

      I read this definition the same night I finished Vilette, and thought it went a great way to explaining why I love nineteenth-century novels. Written just as the novel was getting into stride, novels like Vilette are bold and striking because their authors knew they were being more ambitious than much of what had come before, and knew better than to play by the rules. The Brontës are of course a special case because they were women literally playing by their own rules, writing fiction under male pseudonyms for a readership which they had little in common with. (Of course at the same time the Brontës are writing gothic novels, but they are no more true gothic novels than Sandman is a true horror comic.)

      So Vilette is long, winding, off-kilter, and occasionally a little sentimental or frustrating, but it's a fantastic novel, because it's so rich and convinced of its own richness. It's a theological inquiry into the meaning of suffering, an off-kilter courtship novel, an orphan story, a psychological study, a gothic novel rich with symbolism, a story about gender roles, a story about nationality and faith, and a postmodern novel with an unreliable narrator who dares to end her tale with a piece of metafiction which led to infuriated letters from Brontë's close friends.

      There is only one Vilette. It's a really good novel. Go read it!

      ETA: Oh, I did mean to put in a little note about how you will spend like a fifth of the novel flipping to the end to read French-to-English translations. I have some basic French reading comprehension but there is an awful lot of it in this one. I suppose it simply was very common to speak French in 1850s England. It's a common assumption of many novels of the period but Vilette is one of the most extreme. I bet it would be really enjoyable for confident bilinguals, though, because she does such an interesting job code-switching.
    • 5/5
      Why on God's green earth does everyone read Jane Eyre, but not this amazing book?
    • 4/5
      The plot was full of rather unbelievable chance encounters and re-encounters, descriptions were slow to very slow. The character studies, however, were flawless.
    • 3/5
      This was a difficult book to read, though I did enjoy it - it's Brontë's writing style that makes it tough. But the subject matter and themes are also a bit dense and hard-going, and this novel won't appeal to most people, I imagine.The story is based loosely on Brontë's own experiences in Belgium, and there are striking similarities to her previous and well-known work Jane Eyre. Lucy Snow in Vilette is also reserved, an orphan, and someone who prefers to watch rather than participate in the world. But even while she observes the people around her, she is being observed, making this a great book for fans of the Gaze in literary theory & criticism. Ultimately, I'd say that Vilette is like Jane Eyre squared, and a good deal more interesting for it. But even so, it was difficult to read and rather long, and I prefer Jane to Lucy. The final statements of each book are nearly the same, in any case: for the heroines to thrive, they must have the power and control in their lives (ie: Jane must be Rochester's caretaker, Lucy must become her own mistress).
    • 3/5
      Wow - this book took me forever to read. I admire Charlotte Bronte's writing style, her word choices are wonderful. However, the story itself wasn't nearly as interesting as the back cover described. This is a semi-autobiographical book of Charlotte's life when she lived in Belgium. What a sad and lonely life it must have been. Lucy Snowe was the main character in this story and it starts when she was young (around 10) and living in England. The majority of the rest of the book takes place in the city of Villette where she serves as a teacher in a girls school. She meets up with people from her childhood and their company gives her some sort of small social life. Otherwise most of her time is spent at the school. There she meets and falls in love with an eccentric professor. This book is not nearly as enjoyable as "Jane Eyre" but I'm glad I read it. But I did find it quite tedious in many parts.
    • 5/5
      Lucy Snow, the star-crossed narrator of Villette, is a destitute, lonely, and intelligent young woman who ventures into a vaguely sinister francophone country in order to find work and forge some of the thickest emotional armor in British literature. She is also a devious and unapologetic liar. You can never escape Lucy’s mind, but neither can you trust it. This result is an intense story that simmers just below the boiling point. But what saves the book from turning into an overheated psychological chessgame is the inexorable, heartbreaking, and yet ultimately redeeming need for love. Indeed, it contains one of the most passionate romances ever written. How to find love without letting others, including the loved one, manipulate and exploit our need for love? How to write a novel that is searlingly emotional without being sentimental or melodramatic? That is Charlotte Bronte’s achievement, and Lucy’s painful but necessary defensive maneuvers taught me how to survive some of the more bleak periods in my life.
    • 5/5
      I totally love this book. It has mystery, romance, and ghosts.
    • 3/5
      This story went on and on and on. For the most part it was a very slow read- I wasn't into the characters, not much happened for a long time, and, it just kept going for 556 pages! Lucy Snowe almost never stands up for herself, and I was rather frustrated with her early relationship with M. Paul. That got better at the very end, but still... Things took a long time to come together, and I have to admit that I chastised her many times for her inaction. I was also highly disturbed by the ending- this story is supposed to be somewhat autobiographical, which makes me wonder how that related to her biography. I kept wanting to change Lucy's actions- to make her stand up for herself, to explain things to her, to remind her that she is not some sort of worthless slug or something. So was Charlotte Bronte completely miserable during this period of her life? Don't read this if you expect something light or enjoyable...
    • 5/5
      I was suprised by how much I loved this book. I haven't (gasp) read Jane Eyre, so I wasn't sure what to expect from Bronte, except that it might be a bit of a slog since it is 19th-century British literature.The main character, Lucy Snowe, is a hard nut to crack, but once I started to appreciate her tone and manner of describing people and situations, I soon began to see what a passionate and admirable person was underneath the staid and proper exterior that was presented. For a book written in 1853, Lucy Snowe is ages ahead of her time -- a single woman working to support herself in the world without the assistance of a husband or family. She is brave and smart, and you end up rooting for her right through to the end.I loved this passage: "Behind the house at the Rue Fossette there was a garden - large, considering that it lay in the heart of a city, and to my recollection at this day it seems pleasant: but time, like distance, lends to certain scenes an influence so softening; and where all is stone around, blank wall and hot pavement, how precious seems one shrub, how lovely an enclosed and planted spot of ground!"Lovely, lovely book. Also, it makes me want to brush up on my French.
    • 4/5
      I liked it better the first time I read it. Bronte gets a little carried away with the flowery Victorian language, and the romance was not as compelling as I remembered.
    • 5/5
      I have different editions of this book in every place I've lived, just in case. It is my safety net and my high wire all in one. This edition has no notes, so you have to translate the French and German yourself, kids, but it does have an intro by Angela Carter. Hard to believe that until 35 years ago, this book was out of print...
    • 4/5
      I've had this book on my shelves for years, and I finally plowed through it. It took almost four weeks, which is a long time in book years, for me, anyway. I just had such a hard time getting into the protagonist's head for the first three-quarters of it or so, and I disliked most of the members of the "supporting cast", with one exception, that being Mrs. Bretton. Finally, however, Lucy Snowe really clicked for me, and the rest of the book was quite enjoyable. It wasn't Jane Eyre, but on the strength of those chapters the book was able to stand alone on its own merits for me. I was touched by the growing relationship between Lucy and the man she loved; I was glad to see some of the uselessly annoying characters come to have a raison d'être before the last page. I won't mention the one thing that really bothered me about the story, even after I really began to enjoy it, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but if it weren't for that one thing I'd probably have given this book a better rating.
    • 5/5
      I can't express how wonderful this book is. Villette shows great insight into human nature, and the narrator's perspective of other characters was fascinating.
    • 4/5
      Usually upon finishing a book if I have clearly defined feelings for it either way, those feelings shall become muted over time and I will forget the initial burst of emotion which created such an opinion. I have to say that this is far from being the case with Villette. This being my first book by Charlotte (no, I haven't read Jane Eyre yet), I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Having read Austen and found it incredibly dreary, repetitive and passionless, I was concerned that perhaps this owed a certain amount to the socialisation of the period and would have Charlotte be the same. Having read Villette, I have since discovered that her opinion of Austen was much the same as my own.The story follows Lucy Snowe as she struggles to find her feet after becoming all but destitute. She bravely decides to move to the continent to try to find work there and eventually becomes an English teacher at a girl's school. The reader is taken into Miss Snowe's confidence, learning of her loneliness, her joy, her hopes, her disappointments. We watch the shifting fortunes of those close to Lucy, and I found that far from Austen's entirely predictable story lines, I really did not know what was going to happen in the end to most of the characters. These are complex people as opposed to two-dimensional moral examples. Lucy occasionally behaves in an unreasonable way, yet I would always find myself empathising, chuckling and believing I would most probably have reacted in exactly the same way. This, I believe, was the ultimate charm of Villette: believable, warm, or even intensely irritating characters who were wonderfully fleshed out and brought to life. Lucy Snowe is as strong a female character as you would ever be likely to find in most modern fiction, and this delighted me. Her dry, witty commentary on unfolding events always made me laugh and by the end of the story I felt I had made a dear friend. I may not have yet read Jane Eyre, but believe me, I soon will.

    Book preview

    Villette (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) - Charlotte Bronte

    cover.jpg

    VILLETTE

    By CHARLOTTE BRONTE

    Introduction by

    MARY AUGUSTA WARD

    Villette

    By Charlotte Bronte

    Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5685-6

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5686-3

    This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Cover Image: a detail of Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel in the School Garden (colour litho), by Charles Edmund Brock (1870-1938) (after) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

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    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    Chapter I. Bretton

    Chapter II. Paulina

    Chapter III. The Playmates

    Chapter IV. Miss Marchmont

    Chapter V. Turning a New Leaf

    Chapter VI. London

    Chapter VII. Villette

    Chapter VIII. Madame Beck

    Chapter IX. Isidore

    Chapter X. Dr. John

    Chapter XI. The Portress’s Cabinet

    Chapter XII. The Casket

    Chapter XIII. A Sneeze Out of Season

    Chapter XIV. The Fête

    Chapter XV. The Long Vacation

    Chapter XVI. Auld Lang Syne

    Chapter XVII. La Terrasse

    Chapter XVIII. We Quarrel

    Chapter XIX. The Cleopatra

    Chapter XX. The Concert

    Chapter XXI. Reaction

    Chapter XXII. The Letter

    Chapter XXIII. Vashti

    Chapter XXIV. M. De Bassompierre

    Chapter XXV. The Little Countess

    Chapter XXVI. A Burial

    Chapter XXVII. The Hôtel Crécy

    Chapter XXVIII. The Watchguard

    Chapter XXIX. Monsieur’s Fête

    Chapter XXX. M. Paul

    Chapter XXXI. The Dryad

    Chapter XXXII. The First Letter

    Chapter XXXIII. M. Paul Keeps His Promise

    Chapter XXXIV. Malevola

    Chapter XXXV. Fraternity

    Chapter XXXVI. The Apple of Discord

    Chapter XXXVII. Sunshine

    Chapter XXXVIII. Cloud

    Chapter XXXIX. Old and New Acquaintance

    Chapter XL. The Happy Pair

    Chapter XLI. Faubourg Clotilde

    Chapter XLII. Finis

    Biographical Afterword

    Introduction

    I

    During the year which followed the publication of ‘Shirley,’ Charlotte Bronte seems to have been content to rest from literary labor—save for the touching and remarkable Preface that she contributed in the autumn of the year to the reprint of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey,’—which had been happily rescued from Mr. Newby and were safe in Mr. Smith’s hands. We hear nothing of any new projects. After the great success of ‘Shirley’ and ‘Jane Eyre,’ indeed, she turned back to think of the still unprinted manuscript of ‘The Professor,’ and to plans of how work already done might be turned to account, now that the public knew her and the way was smoothed. Towards the end of 1850, or in the first days of 1851, she wrote a fresh preface to ‘The Professor,’ and suggested to her publishers that they should at last venture upon its publication. They did not apparently refuse; but they advised her against the project; and as Mr. Nicholls says in a note which he added to his wife’s Preface, on the publication of the ‘Professor’ after her death, she then ‘made use of the materials in a subsequent work—Villette.’ There is an interesting and, for the most part, unpublished letter to Mr. George Smith, still in existence, which throws light upon this disappointment of hers—a disappointment which to us is pure gain, since it produced ‘Villette.’ In spite of her gaiety of tone, it is evident that she is sensitive in the matter, and a little wounded—

    Mr. Williams will have told you (she writes to Mr. Smith) that I have yielded with ignoble facility in the matter of ‘The Professor.’ Still it may be proper to make some attempt towards dignifying that act of submission by averring that it was done ‘under protest.’

    ‘The Professor’ has now had the honor of being rejected nine times by the ‘Tr—de.’ (Three rejections go to your own share; you may affirm that you accepted it this last time, but that cannot be admitted; if it were only for the sake of symmetry and effect, I must regard this martyrized MS. as repulsed or at any rate withdrawn for the ninth time!) Few—I flatter myself—have earned an equal distinction, and of course my feelings towards it can only be paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child. Its merits—I plainly perceive—will never be owned by anybody but Mr. Williams and me; very particular and unique must be our penetration, and I think highly of us both accordingly. You may allege that merit is not visible to the naked eye. Granted; but the smaller the commodity—the more inestimable its value.

    You kindly propose to take ‘The Professor’ into custody. Ah—no! His modest merit shrinks at the thought of going alone and unbefriended to a spirited publisher. Perhaps with slips of him you might light an occasional cigar—or you might remember to lose him some day—and a Cornhill functionary would gather him up and consign him to the repositories of waste paper, and thus he would prematurely find his way to the ‘butterman’ and trunkmakers. No—I have put him by and locked him up—not indeed in my desk, where I could not tolerate the monotony of his demure quaker countenance, but in a cupboard by himself.

    In the same letter, she goes on to say—the passage has been already quoted by Mrs. Gaskell—that she must accept no tempting invitations to London, till she has ‘written a book.’ She deserves no treat, having done no work.

    Early in 1851 then, having ‘locked up’ ‘The Professor’ as finally done with and set aside, Miss Bronte fell back once more on the material of the earlier book, holding herself free to use it again in a different and a better way. With all the quickened and enriched faculty which these five years of labor and of fame had brought her, she returned to the scenes of her Brussels experience, and drew ‘Villette’ from them as she had once drawn ‘The Professor.’ By the summer she had probably written the earlier chapters, and early in June she at last allowed herself the change and amusement of a visit to Mr. George Smith and his mother, who were then living in Gloucester Place. This visit contributed much to the growing book. In the first place the character of Graham Bretton,—‘Dr. John’—owed many characteristic features and details to Miss Bronte’s impressions, now renewed and completed, of her kind host and publisher, Mr. George Smith. Mrs. Smith, Mr. George Smith’s mother, was even more closely drawn—sometimes to words and phrases which are still remembered—in the Mrs. Bretton of the book. And further, two incidents at least of this London visit may be recognized in ‘Villette;’ one connected with Thackeray’s second lecture on ‘The English Humourists,’ to which Miss Bronte was taken by her hosts,—the other a night at the theatre, when she saw Rachel act for the first time. As to the lecture, after it was over, the great man himself came down from the platform, and making his way to the small, shy lady sitting beside Mrs. Smith, eagerly asked her ‘how she had liked it.’ How many women would have felt the charm, the honor even, of the tribute implied! But the ‘very austere little person,’ as Thackeray afterwards described her, thus approached, was more repelled than pleased. Paul Emanuel does the like after his lecture at the Athénée, and his chronicler has some sharp words for the ‘restlessness,’ the lack of ‘desirable self-control,’ that the act seemed to her to show. One can only remember that Miss Bronte would have judged herself as she judges another. She too must be allowed her idiosyncrasies. One must no more blame her shrinking than Thackeray’s effusion.

    With regard to the acting of the great, the ‘possessed’ Rachel, it made as deep an impression on Charlotte Bronte, as it produced much about the same time on Matthew Arnold.

    On Saturday (she writes) I went to see Rachel; a wonderful sight—terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet, and revealed a glimpse of hell. I shall never forget it. She made me shudder to the marrow of my bones; in her some fiend has certainly taken up an incarnate home. She is not a woman; she is a snake; she is the——!

    And again—

    Rachel’s acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror . . . it is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a fiend.

    One has only to turn from these letters to the picture of the ‘great actress’ in ‘Villette,’ who holds the theatre breathless on the night when Dr. John and his mother take Lucy Snowe to the play, to see that the passage in the book, with all its marvelous though unequal power, its mingling of high poetry with extravagance and occasional falsity of note, is a mere amplification of the letters. It shows how profoundly the fiery demonic element in Miss Bronte had answered to the like gift in Rachel; and it bears testimony once more to the close affinity between her genius and those more passionate and stormy influences let loose in French culture by the romantic movement. Rachel acted the classical masterpieces; but she acted them as a romantic of the generation of ‘Hernani;’ and it was as a romantic that she laid a fiery hand on Charlotte Bronte.

    After the various visits and excitements of the summer Charlotte tried to make progress with the new story, during the loneliness of the autumn at Haworth. But Haworth in those days seems to have been a poisoned place. A kind of low fever,—influenza—feverish cold—were the constant plagues of the parsonage and its inmates. The poor story-teller struggled in vain against illness and melancholy. She writes to Mrs. Gaskell of ‘deep dejection of spirits,’ and to Mr. Williams that it is no use grumbling over hindered powers or retarded work, ‘for no words can make a change.’ It is a matter between Currer Bell ‘and his position, his faculties, and his fate.’ Was it during these months of physical weakness,—haunted, too, by the longing for her sisters and the memory of their deaths—that she wrote the wonderful chapters describing Lucy Snowe’s delirium of fever and misery during her lonely holidays at the pensionnat? The imagination is at least the fruit of the experience; for the poet weaves with all that comes to his hand. But there are degrees of delicacy and nobility in the weaving. Edmond de Goncourt noted, as an artist—for the public—every detail of his brother’s death, and his own sensations. Charlotte conceived the sacred things of kinship more finely. Those veiled and agonized passages of ‘Shirley’ are all that she will tell the world of woes that are not wholly her own. But of her personal suffering, physical and mental, she is mistress, and she has turned it to poignant and lasting profit in the misery of Lucy Snowe. A misery, of which the true measure lies not in the story of Lucy’s fevered solitude in the Rue Fossette, of her wild flight through Brussels, her confession to Père Silas, her fainting in the stormy street, but rather in the profound and touching passage which describes how Lucy, rescued by the Brettons, comforted by their friendship and at rest, yet dares not let herself claim too much from that friendship, lest, like all other claims she has ever made, it should only land her in sick disappointment and rebuff at last.

    ‘Do not let me think of them too often, too much, too fondly,’ I implored: ‘let me be content with a temperate draught of the living stream: let me not run athirst, and apply passionately to its welcome waters: let me not imagine in them a sweeter taste than earth’s fountains know. Oh! would to God I may be enabled to feel enough sustained by an occasional, amicable intercourse, rare, brief, unengrossing and tranquil: quite tranquil!’

    Still repeating this word, I turned to my pillow; and still repeating it, I steeped that pillow with tears.

    Words so desolately, bitterly true were never penned till the spirit that conceived them had itself drunk to the lees the cup of lonely pain.

    But the spring of the following year brought renewing of life and faculty. She wrote diligently, refusing to visit or be visited, till again, in June, resolution and strength gave way. Her father, too, was ill; and in July she wrote despondently to Mr. Williams as to the progress of the book. In September, though quite unfit for concentrated effort, she was stern with herself, would not let her friend, Ellen Nussey, come,—vowed, cost what it might, ‘to finish.’ In vain. She was forced to give herself the pleasure of her friend’s company ‘for one reviving week.’ Then she resolutely sent the kind Ellen Nussey away, and resumed her writing. Always the same pathetic ‘craving for support and companionship,’ as she herself described it!—and always the same steadfast will, forcing both the soul to patience, and the body to its work. No dear comrades now beside her!—with whom to share the ardors or the glooms of composition. She writes once to Mr. Williams of her depression ‘and almost despair, because there is no one to read a line, or of whom to ask a counsel. Jane Eyre was not written under such circumstances, nor were two-thirds of Shirley.’ During her worst time of weakness, as she confessed to Mrs. Gaskell, ‘I sat in my chair day after day, the saddest memories my only company. It was a time I shall never forget. But God sent it, and it must have been for the best.’—Language that might have come from one of the pious old maids of ‘Shirley.’ How strangely its gentle Puritan note mates with the exuberant, audacious power the speaker was at that moment throwing into ‘Villette’! But both are equally characteristic, equally true. And it is perhaps in the union of this self-governing English piety, submissive, practical, a little stern, with her astonishing range and daring as an artist, that one of Charlotte Bronte’s chief spells over the English mind may be said to lie.

    One more patient effort, however, in this autumn of 1852, and the book at last was done. She sent the later portion of it, trembling, to her publishers. Mr. Smith had already given her warm praise for the first half of the story; and though both he and Mr. Williams made some natural and inevitable criticisms when the whole was in their hands, yet she had good reason to feel that substantially Cornhill was satisfied, and she herself could rest, and take pleasure—and for the writer there is none greater—in the thing done, the task fulfilled. In January 1853 she was in London correcting proofs, and on the 24th of that month the book appeared.

    II

    ‘Villette,’ says Mrs. Gaskell, ‘was received with one burst of acclamation.’ There was no question then among ‘the judicious,’ and there can be still less question now, that it is the writer’s masterpiece. It has never been so widely read as ‘Jane Eyre;’ and probably the majority of English readers prefer ‘Shirley.’ The narrowness of the stage on which the action passes, the foreign setting, the very fullness of poetry, of visualizing force, that runs through it, like a fiery stream bathing and kindling all it touches down to the smallest detail, are repellent or tiring to the mind that has no energy of its own responsive to the energy of the writer. But not seldom the qualities which give a book immortality are the qualities that for a time guard it from the crowd—till its bloom of fame has grown to a safe maturity, beyond injury or doubt.

    ‘I think it much quieter than Shirley,’ said Charlotte, writing to Mrs. Gaskell just before the book’s appearance. ‘It will not be considered pretentious’—she says, in the letter that announces the completion of the manuscript. Strange!—as though it were her chief hope that the public would receive it as the more modest offering of a tamed muse. Did she really understand so little of what she had done? For of all criticisms that can be applied to it, none has so little relation to ‘Villette’ as a criticism that goes by negatives. It is the most assertive, the most challenging of books. From beginning to end it seems to be written in flame; one can only return to the metaphor, for there is no other that renders the main, the predominant impression. The story is, as it were, upborne by something lambent and rushing. Whether it be the childhood of Paulina, or the first arrival of the desolate Lucy in ‘Villette,’ or those anguished weeks of fever and nightmare which culminated in the confession to the Père Silas, or the yearning for Dr. John’s letters, or the growth, so natural, so true, of the love between Lucy and Paul Emanuel on the very ruins and ashes of Lucy’s first passion, or the inimitable scene, where Lucy, led by the ‘spirit in her feet,’ spirit of longing, spirit of passion, flits ghost-like through the festival-city, or the last pages of dear domestic sweetness, under the shadow of parting—there is nothing in the book but shares in this all-pervading quality of swiftness, fusion, vital warmth. And the detail is as a rule much more assured and masterly than in the two earlier books. Here and there are still a few absurdities that recall the drawing-room scenes of ‘Jane Eyre’—a few unfortunate or irrelevant digressions like the chapter ‘Cleopatra,’—little failures in eye and tact that scores of inferior writers could have avoided without an effort. But they are very few; they spoil no pleasure. And as a rule the book has not only imagination and romance, it has knowledge of life, and accuracy of social vision, in addition to all the native shrewdness, the incisive force of the early chapters of ‘Jane Eyre.’

    Of all the characters, Dr. John no doubt is the least tangible, the least alive. Here the writer was drawing enough from reality to spoil the freedom of imagination that worked so happily in the creation of Paulina, and not enough to give to her work that astonishing and complex truth which marks the portrait of Paul Emanuel. Dr. John occasionally reminds us of the Moores; and it is not just that he should do so; there is inconsistency and contradiction in the portrait—not much, perhaps, but enough to deprive it of the ‘passionate perfection,’ the vivid rightness that belong to all the rest. Yet the whole picture of his second love—the subduing of the strong successful man to modesty and tremor by the sudden rise of true passion, by the gentle, all-conquering approach of the innocent and delicate Paulina—is most subtly felt, and rendered with the strokes, light and sweet and laughing, that belong to the subject. As to Paul Emanuel, we need not retell all that Mr. Swinburne has said; but we need not try to question, either, his place among the immortals. ‘Magnificent-minded, grand-hearted, dear faulty little man!’ It may be true as Mr. Leslie Stephen contends, that—in spite of his relation to the veritable M. Héger—there are in him elements of femininity, that he is not all male. But he is none the less man and living, for that; the same may be said of many of his real brethren. And what variety, what invention, what truth, have been lavished upon him! and what a triumph to have evolved from such materials,—a schoolroom, a garden, a professor, a few lessons, conversations, walks,—so rich and sparkling a whole!

    Madame Beck and Ginevra Fanshawe are in their way equally admirable. They are conceived in the tone of satire; they represent the same sharp and mordant instinct that found so much play in ‘Shirley.’ But the mingled finesse and power with which they are developed is far superior to anything in ‘Shirley;’ the curates are rude, rough work beside them.

    And Lucy Snowe? Well—Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre again, the friendless girl, fighting the world as best she may, her only weapon a strong and chainless will, her constant hindrances, the passionate nature that makes her the slave of sympathy, of the first kind look or word, and the wild poetic imagination that forbids her all reconciliation with her own lot, the lot of the unbeautiful and obscure. But though she is Jane Eyre over again there are differences, and all, it seems to me, to Lucy’s advantage. She is far more intelligible—truer to life and feeling. Morbid she is often; but Lucy Snows so placed, and so gifted, must have been morbid. There are some touches that displease, indeed, because it is impossible to believe in them. Lucy Snowe could never have broken down, never have appealed for mercy, never have cried ‘My heart will break!’ before her treacherous rival, Madame Beck, in Paul Emanuel’s presence. A reader, by virtue of the very force of the effect produced upon him by the whole creation, has a right to protest ‘incredible!’ No woman, least of all Lucy Snowe, could have so understood her own cause, could have so fought her own battle. But in the main nothing can be more true or masterly than the whole study of Lucy’s hungering nature, with its alternate discords and harmonies, its bitter-sweetness, its infinite possibilities for good and evil, dependent simply on whether the heart is left starved or satisfied, whether love is given or withheld. She enters the book pale and small and self-repressed, trained in a hard school, to stern and humble ways, like Jane Eyre—like Charlotte Bronte herself. But Charlotte has given to her more of her own rich inner life, more of her own poetry and fiery distinction, than to Jane Eyre. She is weak, but except perhaps in that one failure before Madame Beck, she is always touching, human, never to be despised. She is in love with loving when she first appears; and she loves Dr. John because he is kind and strong, and the only man she has yet seen familiarly. What can be more natural?—or more exquisitely observed than the inevitable shipwreck of this first romance, and the inevitable anguish, so little known or understood by any one about her, that it brings with it? It passes away, like a warm day in winter, not the true spring, only its herald. And then slowly, almost unconsciously, there grows up the real affinity, the love ‘venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy.’ The whole experience is life itself, as a woman’s heart can feel and make it.

    Miss Martineau’s criticism of ‘Villette’—and it is one which hurt the writer sorely—shows a singular, yet not surprising blindness. Even more sharply than in her ‘Daily News’ review, she expresses it in a private letter to Miss Bronte:—

    ‘I do not like the love,’—she says—‘either the kind or the degree of it,’—and she maintains that ‘its prevalence in the book, and effect on the action of it,’ go some way to explain and even to justify the charge of ‘coarseness’ which had been brought against the writer’s treatment of love in ‘Jane Eyre.’ The remark is curious, as pointing to the gulf between Miss Martineau’s type of culture—which alike in its strength and its weakness is that of English provincial Puritanism—and that more European and cosmopolitan type, to which, for all her strong English and Yorkshire qualities, and for all her inferiority to her critic in positive knowledge, Charlotte Bronte, as an artist, really belonged. The truth is, of course, that it is precisely in and through her treatment of passion,—mainly, no doubt, as it affects the woman’s heart and life—that she has earned and still maintains her fame. And that brings us to the larger question with which Charlotte Bronte’s triumph as an artist is very closely connected. What may be said to be the main secret, the central cause not only of her success, but, generally, of the success of women in fiction, during the present century? In other fields of art they are still either relatively amateurs, or their performance, however good, awakens a kindly surprise. Their position is hardly assured; they are still on sufferance. Whereas in fiction the great names of the past, within their own sphere, are the equals of all the world, accepted, discussed, analyzed, by the masculine critic, with precisely the same keenness and under the same canons as he applies to Thackeray or Stevenson, to Balzac or Loti.

    The reason perhaps lies first in the fact that, whereas in all other arts they are comparatively novices and strangers, having still to find out the best way in which to appropriate traditions and methods not created by women, in the art of speech, elegant, fitting, familiar speech, women are and have long been at home. They have practiced it for generations, they have contributed largely to its development. The arts of society and of letter-writing pass naturally into the art of the novel. Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand are the precursors of George Sand; they lay her foundations, and make her work possible. In the case of poetry, one might imagine, a similar process is going on, but it is not so far advanced. In proportion, however, as women’s life and culture widen, as the points of contact between them and the manifold world multiply and develop, will Parnassus open before them. At present those delicate and noble women who have entered there look a little strange to us. Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore—it is as though they had wrested something that did not belong to them, by a kind of splendid violence. As a rule, so far, women have been poets in and through the novel-Cowper-like poets of the common life like Miss Austen, or Mrs. Gaskell, or Mrs. Oliphant; Lucretian or Virgilian observers of the many-colored web like George Eliot, or, in some phases, George Sand; romantic or lyrical artists like George Sand again, or like Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Here no one questions their citizenship; no one is astonished by the place they hold; they are here among the recognized ‘masters of those who know.’

    Why?—For, after all, women’s range of material, even in the novel, is necessarily limited. There are a hundred subjects and experiences from which their mere sex debars them. Which is all very true, but not to the point. For the one subject which they have eternally at command, which is interesting to all the world, and whereof large tracts are naturally and wholly their own, is the subject of love—love of many kinds indeed, but pre-eminently the love between man and woman. And being already free of the art and tradition of words, their position in the novel is a strong one, and their future probably very great.

    But it is love as the woman understands it. And here again is their second strength. Their peculiar vision, their omissions quite as much as their assertions, make them welcome. Balzac, Flaubert, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, dissect a complex reality, half physical, half moral; they are students, psychologists, men of science first, poets afterwards. They veil their eyes before no contributory fact, they carry scientific curiosity and veracity to the work; they must see all and they must tell all. A kind of honor seems to be involved in it—at least for the Frenchman, as also for the modern Italian and Spaniard. On the other hand, English novels by men—with the great exceptions of Richardson in the last century, and George Meredith in this,—from Fielding and Scott onwards, are not, as a rule, studies of love. They are rather studies of manners, politics, adventure.

    Is it the development of the Hebraist and Puritan element in the English mind—so real, for all its attendant hypocrisies—that has debarred the modern Englishman from the foreign treatment of love, so that, with his realistic masculine instinct, he has largely turned to other things? But, after all, love still rules ‘the camp, the court, the grove!’ There is as much innocent, unhappy, guilty, entrancing love in the world as there ever was. And treated as the poets treat it, as George Meredith has treated it in ‘Richard Feverel,’ or in ‘Emilia in England,’ or with that fine and subtle romance which Mr. Henry James threw into ‘Roderick Hudson,’ it can still, even in its most tragic forms, give us joy—as no Flaubert, no Zola, will ever give us joy. The modern mind craves for knowledge, and the modern novel reflects the craving—which after all it can never satisfy. But the craving for feeling is at least as strong, and above all for that feeling which expresses the heart’s defiance of the facts which crush it, which dives, as Renan says, into the innermost recesses of man, and brings up, or seems to bring up, the secrets of the infinite. Tenderness, faith, treason, loneliness, parting, yearning, the fusion of heart with heart and soul with soul, the ineffable illumination that love can give to common things and humble lives,—these, after all, are the perennially interesting things in life; and here the women-novelists are at no disadvantage. Their knowledge is of the centre; it is adequate, and it is their own. Broadly speaking, they have thrown themselves on feeling, on Poetry. And by so doing they have won the welcome of all the world, men and women, realists and idealists alike. For She—‘warm Recluse’—has her hiding-place deep in the common heart, where ‘fresh and green—she lives of us unseen’; and whoever can evoke her, has never yet lost his reward.

    III

    It is as poets then, in the larger sense, and as poets of passion, properly so-called—that is, of exalted and transfiguring feeling—that writers like George Meredith, and George Sand, and Charlotte Bronte affect the world, and live in its memory. Never was Charlotte Bronte better served by this great gift of poetic vision than in ‘Villette’—never indeed so well. The style of the book throughout has felt the kindling and transforming influence. There are few or no cold lapses, no raw fillings in. What was extravagance and effort in ‘Shirley’ has become here a true ‘grand style,’ an exaltation, a poetic ambition which justifies itself. One illustration is enough. Let us take it from the famous scene of the midnight fête, when Lucy, racked with jealousy and longing, escapes from the pensionnat by night, hungering for the silence and the fountains of the park, and wanders into the festal streets, knowing nothing of what is happening there.

    Hush! the clock strikes. Ghostly deep as is the stillness of this house, it is only eleven. While my ear follows to silence the hum of the last stroke, I catch faintly from the built-out capital, a sound like bells, or like a band—a sound where sweetness, where victory, where mourning blend. Oh, to approach this music nearer, to listen to it alone by the rushy basin! Let me go—oh, let me go! What hinders, what does not aid freedom?

    * * * * *

    Quiet Rue Fossette! I find on this pavement that wanderer-wooing summer night of which I mused; I see its moon over me; I feel its dew in the air. But here I cannot stay; I am still too near old haunts: so close under the dungeon, I can hear the prisoners moan. This solemn peace is not what I seek, it is not what I can bear: to me the face of that sky bears the aspect of a world’s death. The park also will be calm—I know, a mortal serenity prevails everywhere—yet let me seek the park.

    * * * * *

    Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.

    * * * * *

    That festal night would have been safe for a very child. Half the peasantry had come in from the outlying environs of Villette, and the decent burghers were all abroad and around, dressed in their best. My straw hat passed amidst cap and jacket, short petticoat, and long calico mantle, without, perhaps, attracting a glance; I only took the precaution to bind down the broad leaf gipsy-wise, with a supplementary ribbon—and then I felt safe as if masked.

    Safe I passed down the avenues—safe I mixed with the crowd where it was deepest. To be still was not in my power, nor quietly to observe. I drank the elastic night air—the swell of sound, the dubious light, now flashing, now fading.

    Then follow the two or three little scenes, so brilliant, and yet so flickering and dream-like, of which Lucy—closely concerned in them all—is the ghostly and unseen spectator; the sight of the Brettons in their carriage; the pursuit of the music swelling through the park, like ‘a sea breaking into song with all its waves’; the Bretton group beside the band; the figures and the talk that surround Madame Beck, and then, climax of the whole, the entry of M. Paul, under the eyes of Lucy—Lucy who watches him from a few yards distance,—secret, ardent, unknown. The story grows fast with every page—magical and romantic, as the park itself with its lights and masks and song; one seems to be watching the incidents in a sparkling play, set in a passionate music; yet all, as it were, through a shining mist, wavering and phantasmal.

    But at last it is over, and Lucy, the spectre, the spy, must go home with the rest.

    I turned from the group of trees and the ‘merrie companie’ in its shade. Midnight was long past; the concert was over, the crowds were thinning. I followed the ebb. Leaving the radiant park and well-lit Haute-Ville, . . . I sought the dim lower quarter.

    Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight—forgotten in the park—here once more flowed in upon perception. High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. The music and the mirth of the fête, the fire and bright hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed. The rival lamps were dying: she held her course like a white fate. Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangour, and were forgotten; with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven and on earth records for archives everlasting.

    This surely is romance, is poetry. It is not what has been called the lactea ubertas of George Sand. It does not flow so much as flash. It is more animated than ‘Jeanne’; more human and plastic than ‘Lélia.’ ‘Consuelo’ comes nearest to it; but even ‘Consuelo’ is cold beside it.

    And then, turn from such a rush of passionate feeling and description to the scenes of character and incident, to the play of satiric invention in the portraits of Madame Beck, the Belgian schoolgirls, Ginevra Fanshawe, M. Paul. What a vivid, homely, poignant truth in it all!—like the sharp and pleasant scent of bruised herbs. No novel, moreover, that escapes obscurity and ugliness was ever freer from stereotyped forms and phrases. The writer’s fresh inventive sense is perpetually brushing them away as with a kind of impatience. The phrases come out new minted, shining; each a venture, and, as a rule, a happy one; yet with no effect of labor or research; rather of a careless freedom and wealth.

    Once again we may notice the influence of French books, of the French romantic tradition, which had evidently flowed in full tide through the teaching of that Brussels class-room, whence literally ‘Villette’ took its being. ‘Villette’ itself, in portions that are clearly autobiographical, bears curious testimony to the French reading, which stirred and liberated Charlotte’s genius, as Hofmann’s tales gave spur and impetus to Emily. It was a fortunate chance that thus brought to bear upon her at a critical moment a force so strong and kindred, a force starting from a Celt like herself, from the Breton Chateaubriand. She owes to it much of her distinction, her European note. French men of letters have always instinctively admired and understood her. They divine that there are certain things in the books of their Romantics that she might very well have written,—the description, for instance, of Chateaubriand’s youth, of his strange sister, of his father and mother, and the old Château of Combourg, in the ‘Mémoires d’Outre Tombe.’ Those pages have precisely her mixture of broad imagination with sharpness of detail; they breathe her yearning and her restlessness. And no doubt, like ‘Atala’ and ‘René,’ they have a final mellowness and mastery, to which the English writer hardly attained.

    But to what might she not have attained had she lived, had she gone on working? Alas! the delicate heart and life had been too deeply wounded; and in the quiet marriage which followed immediately on ‘Villette’ the effort to be simply, personally happy proved too much for one who had known so well how to suffer. The sickness and loneliness through which ‘Villette’ was written had no power, apparently, to harm the book. Above the encroachments of personal weakness she was able for a time to carry her gift, like a torch above a swelling stream, unhurt. In the writing of ‘Shirley’ it was the spectacle of her sisters’ anguish that had distracted and unnerved her. Above her own physical and moral pain, the triumph of ‘Villette’ is complete and extraordinary. But it is clear that she felt a deep exhaustion afterwards. The fragment of ‘Emma,’ indeed, seems to show that she might at some later time have resumed the old task. But for the moment there was clear disinclination for an effort of which she had too sharply measured the cost. In another unpublished letter to Mr. Smith, written in 1854, two months before her own marriage, and shortly after Mr. Smith’s, she says—

    April 25, 1854.

    My dear Sir,—Thank you for your congratulations and good wishes; if these last are realised but in part—I shall be very thankful. It gave me also sincere pleasure to be assured of your own happiness, though of that I never doubted. I have faith also in its permanent character, provided Mrs. George Smith is, what it pleases me to fancy her to be. You never told me any particulars about her—though I should have liked them much—but did not like to ask questions, knowing how much your mind and time would be engaged. What I have to say is soon told.

    The step in contemplation is no hasty one; on the gentleman’s side at least, it has been meditated for many years, and I hope that in at last acceding to it, I am acting right; it is what I earnestly wish to do. My future husband is a clergyman. He was for eight years my father’s curate. He left because the idea of this marriage was not entertained as he wished. His departure was regarded by the parish as a calamity, for he had devoted himself to his duties with no ordinary diligence. Various circumstances have led my father to consent to his return, nor can I deny that my own feelings have been much impressed and changed by the nature and strength of the qualities brought out in the course of his long attachment. I fear I must accuse myself of having formerly done him less than justice. However, he is to come back now. He has foregone many chances of preferment to return to the obscure village of Haworth. I believe I do right in marrying him. I mean to try to make him a good wife. There has been heavy anxiety, but I begin to hope all will end for the best. My expectations, however, are very subdued—very different, I dare say, to what yours were before you were married. Care and Fear stand so close to Hope, I sometimes scarcely can see her for the shadow they cast. And yet I am thankful too, and the doubtful future must be left with Providence.

    On one feature in the marriage I can dwell with unmingled satisfaction, with a certainty of being right. It takes nothing from the attention I owe to my Father; I am not to leave him—my future husband consents to come here—thus Papa secures by the step a devoted and reliable assistant in his old age. There can, of course, be no reason for withholding the intelligence from your Mother and sisters; remember me kindly to them whenever you write.

    I hardly know in what form of greeting to include your wife’s name, as I have never seen her—say to her whatever may seem to you most appropriate and most expressive of good will. I sometimes wonder how Mr. Williams is, and hope he is well. In the course of the year that is gone Cornhill and London have receded a long way from me; the links of communication have waxed very frail and few. It must be so in this world. All things considered, I don’t wish it otherwise.

    Yours sincerely,

    C. BRONTE.

    George Smith, Esq.

    ‘In the course of the year that is gone Cornhill and London have receded a long way from me; the links of communication have waxed very frail and few. It must be so in this world. All things considered, I don’t wish it otherwise.’

    Sad and gentle words!—written under a grey sky. They imply a quiet, perhaps a final renunciation, above all a deep need of rest. And little more than a year from the date of that letter she had passed through marriage, through the first hope of motherhood,—through death.

    Alas!—To stand in the bare room where she died, looking out on the church where she and her sister lie, is to be flooded at once with passionate regrets, and with a tender and inextinguishable reverence. She, too, like Emily, was ‘taken from life in its prime. She died in a time of promise.’ But how much had the steady eager will wrung already from the fragile body! And she has her reward. For she is of those who are not forgotten, ‘exceeded by the height of happier men;’ whose griefs, rather, by the alchemy of poetry, have become the joys of those who follow after; whose quick delights and clear perceptions are not lost in the general store, but remain visibly marked and preserved to us, in forms that have the time-resisting power, through long years, to reawaken similar delights and perceptions in minds attune and sensitive. This it is to live as an artist; and of no less than this is Charlotte Bronte now assured.

    MARY AUGUSTA WARD.

    1900.

    Chapter I. Bretton

    My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace—Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.

    When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide—so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement—these things pleased me well.

    One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman.

    She was not young, as I remember her, but she was still handsome, tall, well-made, and though dark for an Englishwoman, yet wearing always the clearness of health in her brunette cheek, and its vivacity in a pair of fine, cheerful black eyes. People esteemed it a grievous pity that she had not conferred her complexion on her son, whose eyes were blue—though, even in boyhood, very piercing—and the colour of his long hair such as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother’s features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full-grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune to the possessor.

    In the autumn of the year——I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society.

    Time always flowed smoothly for me at my godmother’s side; not with tumultuous swiftness, but blandly, like the gliding of a full river through a plain. My visits to her 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 charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and wished rather it had still held aloof.

    One day a letter was received of which the contents evidently caused Mrs. Bretton surprise and some concern. I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication: to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed to pass.

    The next day, on my return from a long walk, I found, as I entered my bedroom, an unexpected change. In, addition to my own French bed in its shady recess, appeared in a corner a small crib, draped with white; and in addition to my mahogany chest of drawers, I saw a tiny rosewood chest. I stood still, gazed, and considered.

    Of what are these things the signs and tokens? I asked. The answer was obvious. A second guest is coming: Mrs. Bretton expects other visitors.

    On descending to dinner, explanations ensued. A little girl, I was told, would shortly be my companion: the daughter of a friend and distant relation of the late Dr. Bretton’s. This little girl, it was added, had recently lost her mother; though, indeed, Mrs. Bretton ere long subjoined, the loss was not so great as might at first appear. Mrs. Home (Home it seems was the name) had been a very pretty, but a giddy, careless woman, who had neglected her child, and disappointed and disheartened her husband. So far from congenial had the union proved, that separation at last ensued—separation by mutual consent, not after any legal process. Soon after this event, the lady having over-exerted herself at a ball, caught cold, took a fever, and died after a very brief illness. Her husband, naturally a man of very sensitive feelings, and shocked inexpressibly by too sudden communication of the news, could hardly, it seems, now be persuaded but that some over-severity on his part—some deficiency in patience and indulgence—had contributed to hasten her end. He had brooded over this idea till his spirits were seriously affected; the medical men insisted on travelling being tried as a remedy, and meanwhile Mrs. Bretton had offered to take charge of his little girl. And I hope, added my godmother in conclusion, the child will not be like her mamma; as silly and frivolous a little flirt as ever sensible man was weak enough to marry. For, said she, "Mr. Home is a sensible man in his way, though not very practical: he is fond of science, and lives half his life in a laboratory trying experiments—a thing his butterfly wife could neither comprehend nor endure; and indeed confessed my godmother, I should not have liked it myself."

    In answer to a question of mine, she further informed me that her late husband used to say, Mr. Home had derived this scientific turn from a maternal uncle, a French savant; for he came, it seems; of mixed French and Scottish origin, and had connections now living in France, of whom more than one wrote de before his name, and called himself noble.

    That same evening at nine o’clock, a servant was despatched to meet the coach by which our little visitor was expected. Mrs. Bretton and I sat alone in the drawing-room waiting her coming; John Graham Bretton being absent on a visit to one of his schoolfellows who lived in the country. My godmother read the evening paper while she waited; I sewed. It was a wet night; the rain lashed the panes, and the wind sounded angry and restless.

    Poor child! said Mrs. Bretton from time to time. What weather for her journey! I wish she were safe here.

    A little before ten the door-bell announced Warren’s return. No sooner was the door opened than I ran down into the hall; there lay a trunk and some band-boxes, beside them stood a person like a nurse-girl, and at the foot of the staircase was Warren with a shawled bundle in his arms.

    Is that the child? I asked.

    Yes, miss.

    I would have opened the shawl, and tried to get a peep at the face, but it was hastily turned from me to Warren’s shoulder.

    Put me down, please, said a small voice when Warren opened the drawing-room door, and take off this shawl, continued the speaker, extracting with its minute hand the pin, and with a sort of fastidious haste doffing the clumsy wrapping. The creature which now appeared made a deft attempt to fold the shawl; but the drapery was much too heavy and large to be sustained or wielded by those hands and arms. Give it to Harriet, please, was then the direction, and she can put it away. This said, it turned and fixed its eyes on Mrs. Bretton.

    Come here, little dear, said that lady. Come and let me see if you are cold and damp: come and let me warm you at the fire.

    The child advanced promptly. Relieved of her wrapping, she appeared exceedingly tiny; but was a neat, completely-fashioned little figure, light, slight, and straight. Seated on my godmother’s ample lap, she looked a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax, her head of silky curls, increased, I thought, the resemblance.

    Mrs. Bretton talked in little fond phrases as she chafed the child’s hands, arms, and feet; first she was considered with a wistful gaze, but soon a smile answered her. Mrs. Bretton was not generally a caressing woman: even with her deeply-cherished son, her manner was rarely sentimental, often the reverse; but when the small stranger smiled at her, she kissed it, asking, What is my little one’s name?

    Missy.

    But besides Missy?

    Polly, papa calls her.

    Will Polly be content to live with me?

    "Not always; but till papa comes home. Papa is gone away." She shook her head expressively.

    He will return to Polly, or send for her.

    Will he, ma’am? Do you know he will?

    I think so.

    But Harriet thinks not: at least not for a long while. He is ill.

    Her eyes filled. She drew her hand from Mrs. Bretton’s and made a movement to leave her lap; it was at first resisted, but she said—Please, I wish to go: I can sit on a stool.

    She was allowed to slip down from the knee, and taking a footstool, she carried it to a corner where the shade was deep, and there seated herself. Mrs. Bretton, though a commanding, and in grave matters even a peremptory woman, was often passive in trifles: she allowed the child her way. She said to me, Take no notice at present. But I did take notice: I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint; but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion. Mrs. Bretton did not hear it: which was quite as well. Ere long, a voice, issuing from the corner, demanded—May the bell be rung for Harriet!

    I rang; the nurse was summoned and came.

    Harriet, I must be put to bed, said her little mistress. You must ask where my bed is.

    Harriet signified that she had already made that inquiry.

    Ask if you sleep with me, Harriet.

    No, Missy, said the nurse: you are to share this young lady’s room, designating me.

    Missy did not leave her seat, but I saw her eyes seek me. After some minutes’ silent scrutiny, she emerged from her corner.

    I wish you, ma’am, good night, said she to Mrs. Bretton; but she passed me mute.

    Good-night, Polly, I said.

    No need to say good-night, since we sleep in the same chamber, was the reply, with which she vanished from the drawing-room. We heard Harriet propose to carry her up-stairs. No need, was again her answer—no need, no need: and her small step toiled wearily up the staircase.

    On going to bed an hour afterwards, I found her still wide awake. She had arranged her pillows so as to support her little person in a sitting posture: her hands, placed one within the other, rested quietly on the sheet, with an old-fashioned calm most unchildlike. I abstained from speaking to her for some time, but just before extinguishing the light, I recommended her to lie down.

    By and by, was the answer.

    But you will take cold, Missy.

    She took some tiny article of raiment from the chair at her crib side, and with it covered her shoulders. I suffered her to do as she pleased. Listening awhile in the darkness, I was aware that she still wept,—wept under restraint, quietly and cautiously.

    On awaking with daylight, a trickling of water caught my ear. Behold! there she was risen and mounted on a stool near the washstand, with pains and difficulty inclining the ewer (which she could not lift) so as to pour its contents into the basin. It was curious to watch her as she washed and dressed, so small, busy, and noiseless. Evidently she was little accustomed to perform her own toilet; and the buttons, strings, hooks and eyes, offered difficulties which she encountered with a perseverance good to witness. She folded her night-dress, she smoothed the drapery of her couch quite neatly; withdrawing into a corner, where the sweep of the white curtain concealed her, she became still. I half rose, and advanced my, head to see how she was occupied. On her knees, with her forehead bent on her hands, I perceived that she was praying.

    Her nurse tapped at the door. She started up.

    I am dressed, Harriet, said she; I have dressed myself, but I do not feel neat. Make me neat!

    Why did you dress yourself, Missy?

    "Hush! speak low, Harriet, for fear of waking the girl (meaning me, who now lay with my eyes shut). I dressed myself to learn, against the time you leave me."

    Do you want me to go?

    When you are cross, I have many a time wanted you to go, but not now. Tie my sash straight; make my hair smooth, please.

    Your sash is straight enough. What a particular little body you are!

    It must be tied again. Please to tie it.

    There, then. When I am gone you must get that young lady to dress you.

    On no account.

    Why? She is a very nice young lady. I hope you mean to behave prettily to her, Missy, and not show your airs.

    She shall dress me on no account.

    Comical little thing!

    You are not passing the comb straight through my hair, Harriet; the line will be crooked.

    Ay, you are ill to please. Does that suit?

    Pretty well. Where should I go now that I am dressed?

    I will take you into the breakfast-room.

    Come, then.

    They proceeded to the door. She stopped.

    Oh! Harriet, I wish this was papa’s house! I don’t know these people.

    Be a good child, Missy.

    I am good, but I ache here; putting her hand to her heart, and moaning while she reiterated, Papa! papa!

    I roused myself and started up, to check this scene while it was yet within bounds.

    Say good-morning to the young lady, dictated Harriet. She said, Good-morning, and then followed her nurse from the room. Harriet temporarily left that same day, to go to her own friends, who lived in the neighbourhood.

    On descending, I found Paulina (the child called herself Polly, but her full name was Paulina Mary) seated at the breakfast-table, by Mrs. Bretton’s side; a mug of milk stood before her, a morsel of bread filled her hand, which lay passive on the table-cloth: she was not eating.

    How we shall conciliate this little creature, said Mrs. Bretton to me, I don’t know: she tastes nothing, and by her looks, she has not slept.

    I expressed my confidence in the effects of time and kindness.

    If she were to take a fancy to anybody in the house, she would soon settle; but not till then, replied Mrs. Bretton.

    Chapter II. Paulina

    Some days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort—to tranquillity even—than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one’s eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe’s antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.

    And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld her figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast—some precocious fanatic or untimely saint—I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.

    I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, Papa; my dear papa! This, I perceived, was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.

    What might have been the end of this fretting, had it continued unchecked, can only be conjectured: it received, however, a sudden turn.

    One afternoon, Mrs. Bretton, coaxing her from her usual station

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