Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Villette is a tale of such heartache and psychological realism that reading it is a painful experience. It's heroine, Lucy Snowe, has been thoroughly damaged by unnamed tragic events and reacts by constantly shielding herself from emotional involvement with others, feeling that it is better not to love than to have love torn away. This is, then, not so much a novel of events and plot (like Bronte's more well-known Jane Eyre) as it is an insightful examination of one woman's life journey and responses to a Fate which deals her a very bad hand. She says, "I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains." She thus constantly represses her feelings and her natural inclinations, presenting a false face to others and even attempting to deceive herself. When she does first allow herself to feel human closeness, her tentative hopes are disappointed, and she has to pretend to others (and to herself) that she is not at all affected. But then she allows herself once again to hope for love.

The ending is emotionally wracking, but still we see Lucy continuing to keep on keeping on. She is the essence of resilience in the face of loss, and whether or not hers is the best way of surviving, it does allow her to endure.

Knowing the life history of Charlotte Bronte certainly makes it impossible not to consider this novel as autobiographical. Her mother died when she was five years old, and her two eldest sisters died when she was still a child. The three remaining sisters (Charlotte, Emily, Agnes) and one brother (Branwell) then became isolated and especially close, joining together to create imaginary worlds and write about their fantasies. When the grown-up sisters failed to make a success of teaching, they each wrote novels, and found success there. But then, within a year's time, Charlotte's beloved brother and two remaining sisters all died. This novel was written following those deaths, only a short time before her death at age 39. Despite suffering from depression and ill health, she, like her heroine Lucy Snowe, kept on keeping on.

In many ways, this seems to be a much more modern novel than others of the same time period, in that it examines the interior life of a woman whose exterior is most often overlooked or misinterpreted. At a time when almost all heroines of novels were pretty, charming, well-born, and pampered, Lucy Snowe is plain, socially introverted, poor, and has to make her own way in the world. The depth of the psychological insight provided is remarkable.

Potential readers should be pre-warned that the sentence structure and language make this rather a difficult and slow read. Also, a good bit of the dialogue is untranslated French, which is rather annoying for those of us who decided it was more practical to study Spanish.

I consider this a better book than Jane Eyre, but it easy to see why it is not as widely read. Most folks prefer the happily-ever-after.