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10 (p. 302) feasted on my crust from the Barmecide’s loaf: In a story from The Arabian Nights, Schacabac is served imaginary food and drink by the wealthy Barmecide family. He goes along with the joke until he is rewarded with real sustenance.

Inspired by

Charlotte Brontë and Villette

It is in every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another ... it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time.

—Patrick Brontë

Aside from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) is the best-known biography of a literary figure in the English language and the first life story of one Victorian woman novelist written by another. Patrick Brontë and Arthur Nicholls—Brontë’s father and husband, respectively—asked Gaskell (1810-1865), a close friend of Charlotte’s, to write the book after Brontë’s death in 1855. Gaskell is also remembered as the author of Cranford (1853), Cousin Phillis (1864), and Wives and Daughters (1866).

Villette is widely considered to be Charlotte Brontë’s most autobiographical work (even though Brontë gave Jane Eyre the subtitle “An Autobiography”), and she composed in it almost complete isolation at Gaskell’s home. In Villette, the fictional capital city and the country of Labassecour stand in for Brussels, Belgium, where Brontë taught at a school for two years, beginning in February 1842. The novel’s Paul Emmanuel, a teacher, has a real-life counterpart in Constantin Héger, the husband of the school’s director. Brontë developed an infatuation with Héger during her time at the Brussels school, where they tutored one another in French and English. In creating her heroine, Lucy Snowe, Brontë drew on this experience as well as the abiding loneliness she felt at the school after the departure of her sister Emily.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë contains lengthy excerpts from Charlotte’s letters, such as the following revealing note to her friend and sympathetic reader W. S. Williams dated November 6, 1852, in which Brontë discusses her fictional counterpart, Lucy Snowe:

You say that she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance; it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness.

One important autobiographical element present in Villette, but not in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, is any specific mention of Brontë’s intense feelings for Héger. Warm, good-humored, and scrupulous, Gaskell wished to avoid causing additional sadness to Brontë’s widower by detailing Brontë’s passion for Héger, even though Nicholls and Brontë were not married until 1854, ten years after Brontë had left Brussels. For her part, Héger’s wife remained upset and embarrassed by her depiction as Mme. Beck in Villette, so much so that she refused to be interviewed by Gaskell for the biography. One possible allusion to Brontë’s love for Constantin Héger appears in a letter to her publisher George Smith dated December 6, 1852, and reprinted in The Life of Charlotte Brontë:

I must pronounce you right again, in your complaint of the transfer of interest in the third volume, from one set of characters to another. It is not pleasant, and it will probably be found as unwelcome to the reader, as it was, in a sense, compulsory upon the writer. The spirit of romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting; it would have fashioned a paramount hero, kept faithfully with him, and made him supremely worshipful; he should have been an idol, and not a mute, unresponding idol either; but this would have been unlike real life—inconsistent with truth—at variance with probability. I greatly apprehend, however, that the weakest character