Villette

Jane Eyre is such a defining book for Charlotte Bronte (though she wrote three others) that it's hard not to read Villette through the lens of Jane Eyre -- how's it like Jane, how's it different, and so on.  So, since this is my own blog with my own rules, I'm going to give in to the temptation.

Firstly, Villette is much harder to like than Jane Eyre.  It's relatively plot-less, and Lucy Snowe, the heroine, is not as likable as Jane.  She's particularly prejudiced against Catholics, as well as continentals in general; Jane is somewhat anti-French as well, but Villette takes place in a fictionalized Belgium, so Lucy's prejudices come up again & again.

Secondly, Villette feels much more modern.  Gone are all the Gothic trappings like the madwoman locked in the attic.  (I don't count the "ghost" for obvious reasons).  There are none of the melodrama that one tends to associate more with 19th century fiction (the house fire, the attempted bigamy, etc).  The whole book feels more muted in every way than Jane Eyre.

So, without viewing it through Jane Eyre, what did I think?  It's a novel that takes a while to get into.  Lucy Snowe starts out so reticent that it's tough to keep going at first.  But this is a novel that amply repaid my time -- the characters feel very fully formed, and I was really drawn into Lucy's world.  Coming right after reading The Moonstone, it felt so much more alive. Villette feels like a novel with no contrivances; characters do what they're going to do, not in order to move the plot forward.  There's no easy morality on display either -- the good doesn't uniformly triumph, nor do the bad necessarily suffer.  On the other hand, Bronte also doesn't have the equally facile nihilism of a Thomas Hardy, where things will always go badly.  Instead, we get a mixture of the two, and in somewhat unexpected ways.