I’m not sure how many times I’ve read Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette, but I’d guess six or seven. It’s certainly my favourite novel in English.
Bronte wrote four novels altogether. The Professor, unpublished in her lifetime, was based on the time, between 1842 and 1844, that she spent as a teacher in Brussels. Then came her big hit, Jane Eyre (1847); followed, after the deaths of her siblings—Branwell, Emily and Anne—by Shirley (1849), which is frankly uphill work. Villette was published in January 1853, two years before Charlotte’s own death.
The novel revisits her time in Brussels. Following some unspecified catastrophe, her 23-year-old heroine, Lucy Snowe, travels to the continental city of Villette, where she gets a post at a pensionnat, a girls’ boarding school, first as a governess, then as a teacher of English. She falls in love, somewhat slyly, with two men: an English doctor, whom she knew in her youth, and a temperamental professor at the school, Paul Emanual. The former passion is largely unrequited; the second… problematic.
There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. It’s a long novel — over 600 pages in my ragged paperback edition. And to be honest it gets a bit saggy and repetitive in its middle third. But what marks it out, I think, as the most extraordinary novel in English is the complexity of the central character, and the hallucinatory power of the language.
Lucy slips away from the reader like a will ‘o the wisp. She is pathologically shy and self-effacing; yet, provoked, she stings like a wasp. She combines low self-esteem with strong opinions, which she has no hesitation in putting forth. She has very conservative ideas of what constitutes appropriate female behaviour, and—to a modern reader—an overdeveloped sense of the importance and status of men; yet she sees right through their self-delusion and vanity. She is ferociously anti-Catholic, yet finds herself making her confession to a priest. She gravitates towards empty rooms and deserted garden paths; but she has an acute sense of her own presence. She is thoroughly down-to-earth, yet exists, at times, in a state of hysterical, hallucinatory hyper-awareness.
And then there is the language. Brontë has an extraordinary mastery of sentence length, and an ability to pull linguistic rabbits out of hats. She dances with language on a tightrope. Her command of extended metaphor is stupefying. Forgive me for quoting at length; but there is, I believe, nothing else like it in English literature.
Here she describes that initial personal catastrophe:
I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass — the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest?
Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time — a long time — of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished.
And again, a passage that always reduces me to tears, in which she speculates that her passion for the English doctor may not be entirely unrequited:
(Peri-Banou is a fairy from the Arabian Nights: Brontë’s range of Biblical and mythological reference is… extensive.)
Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the sky-lights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written “Lucy’s Room.” I kept a place for him, too — a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand yet, released from that hold and constriction, I know not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.
And finally, with a major spoiler alert, the book’s devastating ending.
By now, the English doctor has married someone younger, more beautiful and altogether less complicated. Paul Emanuel and Lucy declare their mutual love. But three characters in the story, Madame Beck, Père Silas and Madame Walravens, will do anything in their power to prevent a marriage between the Catholic Paul Emanuel and a Protestant. To save his soul, they contrive to send him away for three years, on business, to the West Indies; but before his departure he sets Lucy up in a small day school of her own.
The school prospers. The time for his return approaches:
And now the three years are past: M. Emanuel’s return is fixed. It is Autumn; he is to be with me ere the mists of November come. My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care: I have cultivated out of love for him (I was naturally no florist) the plants he preferred, and some of them are yet in bloom. I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own.
The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—he is coming.
Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming.
The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God watch that sail! Oh! guard it!
The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—“keening” at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. That storm roared frenzied, for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm.
Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!
Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.
And that’s it. Nothing else ends with a punch like Villette.
The image at the top of this post is of an unknown woman, once thought to be Charlotte Brontë. Unknown artist, watercolour, 1850. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Donald Hounam 