Name: Villette Annotated
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9798655075368

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel, Villette explores the inner life of a lonely young Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, who leaves an unhappy existence in England to become a teacher in the capital of a fictional European country. Drawn to the school's headmaster, Lucy must face the pain of unrequited love and the question of her place in society.For Villette, Brontë drew upon her own experiences ten years earlier, when she studied in Brussels and developed an unreciprocated passion for her married teacher

Villette Annotated

llikaditoo 

Wise people say it is folly to think anybody perfect; and as to likes and dislikes, we should be friendly to all, and worship none.

Her attitude to taking care of the old lady; but also - to everything else? Every hurdle, every bumpy ride along the way - she faces with the same reactiveness. 

My heart sunk one moment, then it revived; for though I forced myself to 

There is nothing like taking all you do at a moderate estimate: it keeps mind and body tranquil; whereas grandiloquent notions are apt to hurry both into fever.

There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored.

Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I 

About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future—such a future as mine—to be dead.

 And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.

Withdrawing to a quiet nook, whence unobserved I could observe—the ball, its splendours and its pleasures, passed before me as a spectacle.

That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol—blind, bloodless, and of granite core. 

We all think ourselves strong in some points; we all know ourselves weak in many.

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to 

 happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

What contradictory attributes of character we sometimes find ascribed to us, according to the eye with which we are viewed! 

“Lived and loved!” said she, “is that the summit of earthly happiness, the end of life—to love? I don’t think it is. It may be the extreme of mortal misery, it may be sheer waste of time, and fruitless torture of feeling.

The longer we live, the more our experience widens; the less prone are we to judge our neighbour’s conduct, to question the world’s wisdom: wherever an accumulation of small defences is found, whether surrounding the prude’s virtue or the man of the world’s respectability, there, be sure, it is needed.

"You looked pale in your slumbers: are you home-sick?”

“To be home-sick, one must have a home; which I have not.”

To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.

Villette

After finishing the last novel written by Charlotte Bronte 'Villette', I didn't know how to position myself. I knew I was discontented with the finishing lines of the book, I felt left out and neglected by Lucy Snowe in most parts of her story, and my mind was puzzled over the character presented by this young woman. 

As a child of the new age honesty in literature with raw feelings and all underlying emotions of the narrator available as if at the palm of your hand, I was surprised and quite annoyed by Lucy Snowe's secrecy and tendency to veil parts of her mind and her past from the reader. Pin-pointing character's flaws and matching them to the traumas they have lived through is one of the things on a reader's to-do list. And Charlotte rids us of it so bluntly, so unapologetically!  

However, determined to understand the ideas of the text, I took to the scholar's works and people's reviews to see what they thought. The discovery of the new ideas highlighted by my fellow readers made me look differently at the whole narrative and, for the first time, perceive beauty in the complexity and rigidness of Lucy Snowe. 

Now, looking back at the physical copy of Villette and seeing bookmarks on every other page, I understand - I saw a lot of valuable details in the portrait but couldn't make sense of the whole picture.  I know for a fact I will be returning to this story in the future: to look at this stoic woman once again, to share my stories with her. 

After finishing the last novel written by Charlotte Bronte 'Villette', I didn't know how to position myself. I knew I was discontented with the finishing lines of the book, I felt left out and neglected by Lucy Snowe in most parts of her story, and my mind was puzzled over the character presented by this young woman. 

As a child of the new age honesty in literature with raw feelings and all underlying emotions of the narrator available as if at the palm of your hand, I was surprised and quite annoyed by Lucy Snowe's secrecy and tendency to veil parts of her mind and her past from the reader. Pin-pointing character's flaws and matching them to the traumas they have lived through is one of the things on a reader's to-do list. And Charlotte rids us of it so bluntly, so unapologetically!  

However, determined to understand the ideas of the text, I took to the scholar's works and people's reviews to see what they thought. The discovery of the new ideas highlighted by my fellow readers made me look differently at the whole narrative and, for the first time, perceive beauty in the complexity and rigidness of Lucy Snowe. 

Now, looking back at the physical copy of Villette and seeing bookmarks on every other page, I understand - I saw a lot of valuable details in the portrait but couldn't make sense of the whole picture.  I know for a fact I will be returning to this story in the future: to look at this stoic woman once again, to share my stories with her. 

Villette Annotated

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