Villette n/e (Oxford World's Classics)

Product Information

Polly soon develops a deep devotion to Graham, who showers her with attention. But Polly's visit is cut short when her father arrives to summon her to live with him abroad. The poor story-teller struggled in vain against illness and melancholy. She writes to Mrs. Gaskell of “deep dejection of spirits,” and to Mr. Williams that it is no use grumbling over hindered powers or retarded work, “for no words can make a change.” Magnificent-minded, grand-hearted, dear faulty little man!” It may be true as Mr. Leslie Stephen contends, that—in spite of his relation to the veritable M. Héger—there are in him elements of femininity, that he is not all male. But he is none the less man and living, for that; the same may be said of many of his real brethren. The Gaskell Society Journal, Volume 22". The Gaskell Society. 2008. p.57 . Retrieved 25 April 2017. Meta (Margaret Emily), the second daughter, was sent at about the same age as Marianne to Miss Rachel Martineau, ... {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help)

Emma, by "Charlotte Brontë and Another Lady", published 1980; although this has been attributed to Elizabeth Goudge, [71] the actual author was Constance Savery. [72] Alexander, Christine (March 1993). " 'That Kingdom of Gloo': Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals and the Gothic". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 47 (4): 409–436. doi: 10.2307/2933782. JSTOR 2933782. Dr. John occasionally reminds us of the Moores; and it is not just that he should do so; there is inconsistency and contradiction in the portrait—not much, perhaps, but enough to deprive it of the ‘passionate perfection,’ the vivid rightness that belong to all the rest.Independence: The theme of independence is present throughout the story. Lucy is quite passive at the beginning of the novel but grows into a very independent woman, particularly for the era in which the story is set. She seeks a job and travels to Villette, despite the fact that she knows very little French. Lucy longs for independence, and when the man she loves leaves to do missionary work in Guadalupe, she lives independently and serves in the role of the headmistress of her own day school. Mr. Home/ Count de Bassompierre: Polly's father, who inherited his noble title within recent years. He is a sensitive and thoughtful man who loves his daughter. When he notices Polly's relationship with Graham, he has difficulty recognising and accepting that his daughter is now a grown woman. He regards her as a mere child and calls her his "little treasure" or "little Polly." He at last relinquishes Polly to Graham, saying, "May God deal with you as you deal with her!" He lives to a ripe old age.

I do not like the love,”—she says—“either the kind or the degree of it,” —and she maintains that “its prevalence in the book, and effect on the action of it,” go some way to explain and even to justify the charge of ‘coarseness’ which had been brought against the writer’s treatment of love in Jane Eyre. Fraser, Rebecca (2008). Charlotte Brontë: A Writer's Life (2ed.). New York: Pegasus Books LLC. p.261. ISBN 978-1-933648-88-0. This visit contributed much to the growing book. In the first place the character of Graham Bretton—“Dr. John”—owed many characteristic features and details to Miss Brontë’s impressions, now renewed and completed, of her kind host and publisher, Mr. George Smith. Ward wrote deeply and sensitively about the works of the Brontë sisters; her direct language and insights still greatly inform the contemporary reader.The modern mind craves for knowledge, and the modern novel reflects the craving—which after all it can never satisfy. But the craving for feeling is at least as strong, and above all for that feeling which expresses the heart’s defiance of the facts which crush it, which dives, as Renan says, into the innermost recesses of man, and brings up, or seems to bring up, the secrets of the infinite.

Buzard, James. 2005. Disorienting fiction: The autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plater, Diana (6 June 2016). "Professor Christine Alexander and Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 7 June 2021. Machuca, Daniela (July 2007), "My own still shadow-world": melancholy and feminine intermediacy in Charlotte Brontë's Villette, eCommons@USASK .

John Graham Bretton: A young physician and the son of Lucy's godmother. Also known as Dr. John, John Graham Bretton is a kindhearted man who lives in Villette. Lucy knew him in her youth and then falls in love with him ten years later when their paths cross once again. Dr. John instead gives his affections first to Ginevra Fanshawe and later to Polly Home, the latter of whom he eventually marries. Mrs. Louisa Bretton: Dr. John Graham Bretton's mother and Lucy's godmother. She is a widow and has "health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune to the possessor." She is immensely proud of her son but is not above teasing him.

Virginia Woolf claims that Villette is Charlotte Brontë's "finest novel," and highlights its evocative descriptions of the natural world as a reflection of the main character's state of mind. [4]

In Lucy Snowe's reveries, she often makes a feeling or an abstract concept into a person. She struggles between her "evil stepmother" of Reason and the "angel" of Feeling, being schooled and instructed by the former and soothed by the later. When Despair stalks Lucy, it it said to "breathe through her." Lucy's inner, buried life is peopled with her own thoughts, and those thoughts have such importance to her that they become as much like people to her as the actual people around her. It is not just a poetic or literary device used by Brontë, but an illustration of Lucy's intense fantasy and imaginative inner life, necessary to her because so much of her outer life is repressed and limited. The personifications of these emotions are almost always female. Objectification of Polly