Charlotte Brontë

Mallory Ortberg

A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Mallory Ortberg, New York Times best-selling author of Texts from Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte’s final and most autobiographical novel—even more critically acclaimed than Jane Eyre during its time—is a brilliant story of repressed passion and unrequited love in the fictional French town of Villette Lucy Snowe is a young woman alone in the world after a terrible event of which she never speaks. With no home, no family, and no prospects, she sets out on her own to the small French town of Villette, where she finds work as a governess at a boarding school for girls. When a handsome doctor from her past appears in Villette, Lucy believes she may at last be free of loneliness—if her rigorous self-control doesn’t conceal her true feelings. Based on Charlotte Bronte’s own experiences at a boarding school in Belgium, Villette is an intense psychological portrait of its heroine, a woman who so strenuously tries to hide her passions that she cannot help but reveal them.

Villette

In Villette, Brontë once again tells the story from the point of view of an autobiographical narrator. Unlike Jane Eyre, however, the narrator of Villette, Lucy Snowe, is neither entirely reliable nor likable. Her unpleasant nature and habit of withholding information from the reader is responsible for the lack of critical consensus about Villette. While some literary scholars see the novel as a well-constructed discourse on the repressive nature of Victorian society, others view it as a disordered representation of a neurotic character. The mixed response to Villette was evident in the first reviews it received, and it never achieved the popularity of Jane Eyre. There are marked similarities between Villette and Jane Eyre: Both narrators are orphans, both teach to earn their livings, and both consider themselves unattractive. In both novels, Brontë drew on her own experience to create a realistic setting; indeed, Villette is placed in the same Belgian territory as Brontë's first novel, The Professor. Yet Villette differs from the previous novels in a number of important ways. Formally, the shifting focus, plot coincidences, and length of time that passes between Lucy's narration and the events that she recounts all challenge the conventions of the realistic novel. This departure is particularly evident in the ending, when Lucy refuses to explain what has happened to her fiancé, Paul Emanuel, and instead tells the reader to imagine that she has been reunited with him and has embarked on a blissful life. The reality, which Lucy condescendingly assumes the reader is too sentimental to accept, is that Paul has been drowned in a violent storm at sea.

(Annotated Edition)

LIMEKI 

My spirits had long been gradually sinking [...]they went down fast. Even to look forward wasn't to hope. The dumb future spoke no comfort, offered no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on future good. A Sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me despairing resignation to reach bedtimes the end of all things earthly. Alas! when I had full leisure to look on life as life must be looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert-tawny sands with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view.

ella

Il sole sorse giocondo, col suo volto estivo. La mattina adornò la propria bellezza di rubini e si riempì talmente il grembo di rose, che queste piovvero a fiumi, colorando di rosso il sentiero. Le Ore si svegliarono fresche come ninfe e, vuotando sulle colline le loro boccette di rugiada, uscirono all'aperto senza ricoprirsi col mantello di nebbia: prive di ombre, azzurre e gloriose, condussero i destrieri del sole lungo un cammino ardente e senza nuvole.

Ma dove, poi, la luna non è bella? Quale scenario, vasto o limitato che sia, la sua orbita non arriva a santificare? Rosea e infuocata, saliva ora al di sopra di un'altura non lontana; mentre ne contemplavo l'ascesa splendente, la luna si schiarì, si fece d'oro e, in un momento, la vedemmo fluttuare in alto senza una macchia in un cielo ormai tranquillo.

Il sole vi splendeva, facendo della costa una sola lunga linea d'oro; il minuscolo disegno di una città fitta di case e di una torre scintillante di neve, di vasti boschi, di cime frastagliate, di pascoli distesi e di vene d'acqua era inciso sul panorama lucente come metallo. Sullo sfondo si stendeva un cielo solenne e di un profondo blu e, imponente della sua magnifica promessa, soffice di delicati colori, da nord a sud si imponeva l'arcobaleno teso da Dio, l'arco della speranza.

It's very beautifully written. I got kinda bored at some parts as I'm not used to such slow readings, but I ended up way too deep feeling Lucy's sadness.

Bailee Strong

3.5 the best parts were always the emotional extremes, i love a meltdown written by the Bronte sisters its like they get it or smtg

Jorge Cobian Cruz

Finales de otras épocas 

Este libro, de otra época describe fielmente lo que la literatura contemporánea a cambiado, el amor platónico sin necesidad de piel, es tan fuerte e inspirador que deleita su lectura.

Edward

A bold and powerful story assuredly but cryptically told. Unwound slowly like a watch spring. Must read again with clearer eyes.

Villette (Penguin Classics)

liz mcclaran

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There, she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings - first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë'sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. Helen M. Cooper's new introduction places the novel in the context of Brontë's life and career and argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism. 'I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette' George Eliot 'Her finest novel' Virginia Woolf

Jade Flynn

Bronte's prose is as always ingeniously composed and controlled. I'm puzzled as to why people only read Jane Eyre and then never read another from Charlotte. I will say there are an abundance of long passages in French which may be an issue for many people, so I'd recommend having google translate at the ready if you need it. I found Villette to be a novel where it benefits from being read at a slower pace, I purposely slowed my reading down because I didn't want it to end. Also, I really liked Lucy - which seems to be an unpopular opinion? Read it.

Kylie Pace

The descriptions of imagined conversations with personified emotions I had to skip through, but the style of writing eventually hooked me into the story. I think being not limited to strict descriptions of reality expresses Lucy's angst and disappointment, which in turn is how I found myself identifying with this character even though her world so little resembles mine. So I came around to it and very much enjoyed this book, to my surprise.

Acclaimed by Virginia Woolf as "Brontë's finest novel," this moving psychological study features a remarkably modern heroine who abandons her native England for a new life as a schoolteacher in Belgium.

Tess Letasz

A wonderful read! Lucy has a very real battle with depression but displays bravery by leaving the life and country she’s known her whole life behind to begin anew in a country she doesn’t even know the language in. The relationship between her and the love interest evolves slowly and it took a long time to warm up to him even for her but their relationship was actually adorable. 

Villette (Penguin Popular Classics)

Binish Fatima

Pia Sophia

What a dull, tedious book. The only reason I finished it was because I wanted to find out why this is supposed to be Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. I still don't know why that is...

The story drags on way too long. Lucy Snowe is a terrible human being. And the fact that most of the dialogue is in French had me so annoyed at one part that I seriously dreaded picking the book up again to continue reading.

As for the ending, it felt too bland. As did the rest of the book. A big nope from me, this one.

clara

Villette (Signet Classics)

sariya

An adaptation of the classic novel on the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. With echoes of the illness and loss that wracked Brontë’s own life, both novel and play explore the redemptive power of love and the uncertainty of holding on to it. Lucy Snowe, alone and abandoned, boards a boat in search of purpose. Arriving at an archaeological site digging for the remains of the elusive Lady of Villette, she works alongside the beautiful Gin, the prying Beck, the charming Dr John and the remote Professor Paul, though Lucy remains an outsider. Absorbed in her work to find a cure for the next pandemic to secure humanity’s future, can she open herself up to the possibility of love and put the bones of the past behind her?

Villette

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