Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [280]
The Life of Charlotte Brontë became one of Gaskell’s best-selling books and helped to cement Brontë’s literary reputation for generations to come. The critic George Henry Lewes, upon reading Gaskell’s book, wrote to her saying that it “will, I think, create a deep and permanent impression.... One learns to love Charlotte, and deeply to respect her.”
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Charlotte Brontë’s Villette through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
Robert Southey
Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.
—from a letter to Charlotte Brontë (March 1837)
Harriet Martineau
The whole three volumes [of Villette] are crowded with beauties—with the good things for which we look to the clear sight, deep feeling and singular, though not extensive, experience of life which we associate with the name of ‘Currer Bell.’ But under all, through all, over all, is felt a drawback, of which we were anxious before, but which is terribly aggravated here—the book is almost intolerably painful. We are wont to say, when we read narratives which are made up of the external woes of life, such as may and do happen every day, but are never congregated in one experience—that the author has no right to make readers so miserable. We do not know whether the right will be admitted in the present case, on the ground of the woes not being external; but certainly we ourselves have felt inclined to rebel against the pain, and, perhaps on account of protraction, are disposed to deny its necessity and truth. With all her objectivity, ‘Currer Bell’ here afflicts us with an amount of subjective misery which we may fairly remonstrate against; and she allows us no respite—even while treating us with humour, with charming description and the presence of those whom she herself regards as the good and gay. In truth, there is scarcely anybody that is good—serenely and cheerfully good, and the gaiety has pain in it. An atmosphere of pain hangs about the whole, forbidding that repose which we hold to be essential to the true presentment of any large portion of life and experience.
—from the Daily News (February 3, 1853)
The Spectator
Villette is Brussels, and Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself.’ Of plot, strictly taken as a series of coherent events all leading to a common result, there is none; no more, at least, than there would be in two years of any person’s life who had occupations and acquaintances, and told us about them. Of interesting scenes, and of well-drawn characters, there is, on the other hand, abundance ; and these, though they fail to stimulate the curiosity of the reader like a well-constructed plot, sustain the attention, and keep up a pleasant emotion, from the first page to the last.
All the emotions excited by art are pleasant, even though their subject-matter be in itself painful; otherwise we should