Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [12]
In the public world of the novel, Lucy is fiercely protective of her private thoughts and feelings. Yet behind the scenes she reveals her secrets to her readers through an intensely personal narrative. In these moments Brontë creates for Lucy a descriptive language for the inexpressible. In doing so, she explores the uncanny realm of being—the material reality of the body that competes with the desire for immortality, the intensity of memory versus the awareness of what will always be lost, the starkness of fact against the sensuality of what can only be imagined. While Lucy may be remembered as Brontë’s most autobiographical creation, she is, ultimately, Brontë’s map for female literary genius, an intangible authorial presence that remains perplexing, dynamic, and vividly invisible.
Laura Engel received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and drama. Her previous publications include essays on the novelists A. S. Byatt and Edna O’Brien. She is currently working on a book that explores the connections between women and celebrity in eighteenth-century culture. Engel also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Villette
By CURRER BELL
AUTHOR OF “JANE EYRE,” “SHIRLEY,” ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOLUME ONE
CHAPTER 1
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 cheeks, 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