Villette by Charlotte Bronte / Review

I often wish that I could go back in time to sixth grade and read Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre for the very first time.   Though I often re-read my desert-island favorites, and while they certainly continue to bloom on the tenth or twentieth perusal, what was it like to read them the first time without preconception? Without favorite heroes and loathed villains and oft-quoted treasured sentences?

In spite of my myopic English studies in college, almost always focused on 19th century British literature when I could possibly help it, I had never read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, a novel written after her initial though anonymous success with Jane Eyre and largely considered to be autobiographical. Famously, Virginia Woolf claimed that this was Bronte’s “finest novel.”

To read a Bronte for the very first time — the perfect way to wrap up a year of reading.

In Villette, a family tragedy leaves young Lucy Snowe impoverished and without hope or family, excepting her godmother Mrs. Bretton and her son Graham.  Living with them until her own young adulthood, Lucy then sets out on adventure, rather accidentally travelling to a foreign city, Villette (modeled on Brussels). There,  Lucy stumbles upon a job in a boarding school, first as a governess, then promoted into the position of an English teacher.

Lucy becomes acquaintances with a handsome young doctor who tends to the young girls at the school.  As fate would have it, it is the self-same young man in whose home Lucy was raised — Graham Bretton, now ”Dr. John.” Friendship blossoms anew between Dr. John, Lucy, and his mother; and, naturally, infatuation isn’t far behind. All the while, Lucy battles with an ornery literature professor, M. Paul Emmanuel, who challenge’s Lucy’s intellect and fortitude.

Can you figure out where this goes?  Dr. John falls in love with another (prompting one of my new favorite lines in all of literature: “Goodnight, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, but you are not mine.”), and Lucy falls in love with the brooding and complicated M. Paul.

But, wait: I don’t want you to think this is just a romance. Bronte is never “chick lit”. That is not true of Jane Eyre, and it is even less true of Villette.  Yes, in broad strokes, there is a young lady coming of age who meets her match and falls in love. But that is not solely what these 559 pages are made of.  Much to my students’ frequent chagrin, Bronte doesn’t really care about plot — keeping the story moving along or enticing the reader to stay interested. No, while Jane Austen (the apple of my bookish eye and more frequent proprietor of  ye olde chick lit) writes the plot of “four or five families in a country village”, Bronte writes about the emotional landscape of one individual’s life. This frequently requires the detailing of little moments, insignificant conversations, and microscopic little nuances and opinions that an author enslaved to plot would never reveal.  Austen gives the reader the best parts; Bronte gives the reader everything.

(This is all tangentially to say that to love Austen is not to necessarily love Bronte, and to equate one with the other is like Nicholas Sparks equating himself with Hemingway. Well, maybe it’s not that heinous a literary crime … but you get the idea.)

So, Reader, is Villette superior to Jane Eyre, for, after all, that was the question I sought to answer in my year-end reading escapade. Well, not for me.  Perhaps because there is nothing like the blind devotion of first love. I thoroughly enjoyedVillette, but it didn’t have the wildness, the passion, the lack of self-possession that is often demonstrated in Jane Eyre. And I would posit that this is probably the exact reason that Virginia Woolf felt the opposite.

Villette is measured, reasoned, and much more grown up than Jane Eyre.  It was great to read something real.  Something substantial. Something to be sipped and savored rather than gulped and judged. Something transcendent. Something worthy of being my 79th book in 2010 — a perfect bookend to a delightful reading year.