Villette (1853)

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. ( )

The plot was full of rather unbelievable chance encounters and re-encounters, descriptions were slow to very slow. The character studies, however, were flawless. ( )

For a very long time I've thought that the only Bronte novel I would ever really like is [b:Jane Eyre|10210|Jane Eyre|Charlotte Brontë|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51-Atpe8kVL._SL75_.jpg|2977639]. I am very pleased to have put that idea to the challenge and proven myself wrong.

Villette is not an easy novel. To start with, like so many Victorian novels it is dense and slow moving, particularly in the middle section. The plot could be summed up in a single paragraph and no opportunity is lost to take a page to say what could be said in a single sentence. The narrative is heavily reliant on coincidence and is replete with anti-Roman Catholic and (to a lesser extent) anti-European sentiment. These are factors which can sorely test the patience of the contemporary reader.

As with Jane Eyre, Villette is a first person narrative in the form of a memoir. The heroine, Lucy Snowe, makes it clear that she is reflecting on events long past. Like her literary sister Jane Eyre, Lucy is poor and has to earn her own living. Again like Jane, Lucy is intelligent, self-contained and principled, with a passionate nature just below the surface. However, notwithstanding some similarities between the characters, Lucy is very different from Jane and her character is in part what makes the novel more difficult than Jane Eyre, but ultimately very rewarding.

Jane Eyre confides in her readers. As a narrator, she holds nothing back of what she is thinking and what she is feeling. She draws readers into her world, trusting that they will understand her and empathise with her. Lucy Snowe, on the other hand, keeps things back. She does not reveal everything she knows. Some of those things readers find out in due course. Other things remain hidden. Lucy's reticence can be frustrating, but it is part of her psychological profile. And at it's deepest level, this is what the novel is all about. Bronte does a superb job of revealing much more about Lucy's mind than Lucy appears to reveal as the narrator of her life story. Bronte's description of Lucy's depression, for example, is gut-wrenching. From being initially frustrated with Lucy, I was ultimately totally engaged by her. I ached for her in her despair, her depression and her loneliness. I desperately wanted her to find happiness. Her story continued to haunt me for day after I finished the book.

Villette said to be the most autobiographical of Charlotte Bronte's novels, with the town of Villette being based on Brussels, where Bronte taught, and the character of Paul Emmanuel being based on M Heger, the married teacher with whom Bronte fell in love. My knowledge of Bronte's life is sketchy, but this novel makes me want to understand her better. It also makes me want to read her other works, which is not something I ever thought I would want to do.

This is not a novel for a reader who wants something light and fluffy. It is not a novel for a reader who wants clean, spare prose or a fast-paced story. I'm glad that I listened to an audiobook - the Naxos edition narrated by the excellent Mandy Weston - as I suspect that my patience would have been tried by reading the text. Overall, it was a great experience. While I'm not totally persuaded that Villette is a better novel than Jame Eyre, it is nevertheless a very impressive work. ( )

I had a complicated relationship with Villette. The French-with-endnotes drove me to distraction, what with the constantly having to flip back and forth to understand what was going on. Footnotes. Footnotes are the way to go, Penguin, if you must make your primary text bilingual.

But I liked Lucy as a character, and the unreliable narrator thing was interesting. Frustrating, and intriguing as a literary technique. I loved her snarkiness, her sound knowledge that she is totally smarter than you, her stubbornness and self-reliance and bravery. And I think she had a crush on Ginevra.

I wasn't too fond of the plot-by-coincidence method - I can forgive this once or twice, but every major point that moved the plot forward hinged on a highly improbable attack of deus ex machina. Still, I don't do classics that often, and I am quite probably missing an understanding of how the genre works.

And the love interest. Was I supposed to loathe him? If so, the text is successful. I bitterly resented him becoming somewhat sympathetic toward the end, and so the ambiguous book ending suited me very well.

I keep waffling between this being a three star or a four star. It's stayed with me more than a three star read does, but there were parts I purely hated about this book. Also, the random, pointless ableism ought to have been cut. ( )

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. ( )