Villette Charlotte Bronte

In Villette and Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë creates protagonists who are markedly strange and isolated people. Throughout both books, their awkwardness in society and difficulty communicating is a continuous concern. These women are also our...

Supernatural events and portents are a major theme in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. While Brontë never crosses into a truly magical realm, it is clear that Lucy Snowe believes that certain events pertain to the supernatural world. Forces of nature...

Reading the novels of Defoe alongside those of Austen or Brontë feels very different, even though they wrote less than a century apart. In Austen’s novels, the formal delineation of chapters increases distance in the reading experience that a...

Lucy Snowe, the narrator in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, delivers a narrative that is very much the story that she wants the reader to hear. She explicitly details some facets of her life and leaves others drenched in opaque clouds of metaphor....

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) explores repression and projection of identity through the voice of the suffering, confusing, and often unreliable Lucy Snowe. This novel emerged after Brontë’s acclaimed Jane Eyre, exemplifying a newfound...

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette revolves around the myriad cycles and seasons of life. Lucy Snowe traverses from place to place, witnessing different stages of life and yearning for her own fulfillment of elusive experiences. Lucy’s introspections...

Following a foray into third-person omniscience in her second novel, Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette returns to the first-person narration for which Jane Eyre remains famous. Unlike that novel’s immediately vivid and feisty eponymous...

Critics have long puzzled over what Emily Heady terms an “uneasy fusion” of genres in Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette (341). Toeing the line between two dominant—and, in many regards, opposing—literary modes of the era, realism and Gothic...

With the 1847 publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë—publishing under the androgynous pseudonym “Currer Bell”—effectively obscured her gender along with her identity. While Brontë did not unanimously pass for male, debate about the author’s...

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette references a menagerie of folklore and inhabits many stand-out qualities often seen in fairy-tales throughout the novel. This is aided by the fantastical narration provided by Lucy Snowe, the protagonist who seems to...

The preoccupation with the structure of class and class-relations in Austen’s Emma and Brontë’s Villette arises from the particularities of their historical context. Caught in the liminal moment between two social and political paradigms, modern...

Reflection versus Conversation

The 19th and 20th centuries introduced readers to a variety of prominent authors who are still read today. Two of these prominent and well-read authors from each period include Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys...