have hesitated in applying the term to the emotions caused by this book. For while the characters are various, happily conceived, and some of them painted with a truth of detail rarely surpassed, the centre figure—the girl who is supposed to write the book—is one who excites sympathies bittersweet, and in which there is little that is cheerful or consoling. Like Jane Eyre in her intense relish for affection, in her true-heartedness, in her great devotion to the small duties of her daily life, there is nothing of a compensation for the affection denied her. If it were not too harsh a word to be used of so good a girl as Miss Lucy Snowe, one might almost say that she took a savage delight in refusing to be comforted, in a position indeed of isolation and hardship, but one still that a large experience of mankind and the miseries incident to the lot of humanity would hardly pronounce to be by comparison either a miserable or a degraded lot. But this book, far more than Jane Eyre, sounds like a bitter complaint against the destiny of those women whom circumstances reduce to a necessity of working for their living by teaching, and who are debarred from the exercise of those affections which are indeed the crown of a woman’s happiness, but which it is unwise and untrue to make indispensable to a calm enjoyment of life and to an honourable and useful employment of it. Nor do we think that the morbid sensibility attributed to Lucy Snowe is quite consistent with the strength of will, the daring resolution, the quiet power, the discretion and good sense, that are blended with it in Currer Bell’s conception. Still less, perhaps, is such a quality, involving as it does a constant tormenting self-regard, to be found in common with clear insight into the characters and motives of others, and with the habit of minute observation, which, resulting in admirable and clear delineation, makes Lucy Snowe’s autobiography so pleasant a book in all respects except the spasms of heart-agony she is too fond of showing herself in—we will not venture to hint of showing herself off in, for there is a terrible feeling of reality about them, which seems to say that they are but fictitious in form, the transcripts of a morbid but no less than real personal experience.
—February 12, 1853
George Eliot
I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.
—from a letter to Mrs. Bray (February 15, 1853)
Matthew Arnold
Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact, put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long run.
—from a letter to Mrs. Forster (April 14, 1853)
Algernon Charles Swinburne
There is a certain charm of attraction as well as compassion wrought upon us by the tragic childhood of Jane Eyre; and no study can exceed for exquisite veracity and pathos the subtle and faultless portrait of the child Paulina in the opening chapters of Villette; but the attraction of these is not wholly or mainly the charm of infancy ... it comes rather from the latent suggestion or refraction of the woman yet to be, struck sharply back or dimly shaded out from the deep glass held up to us of a passionate and visionary childhood. We begin at once to consider how the children in Charlotte Brontë’s books will grow up.
—from A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877)
Leslie Stephen
Although the secret of Miss Brontë’s power lies, to a great extent, in the singular force with which she can reproduce acute observations of character from without, her most esoteric teaching, the most accurate reflex from her familiar idiosyncracies, is of course to be found in the characters painted from within. We may infer her personality more or less accurately from the mode in which she contemplates her own spirit. Among the characters who are more or less mouthpieces of her peculiar