Villette (Penguin Classics)

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Ellen, I wish I could live with you always. I begin to cling to you more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness...

The Professor, written before Jane Eyre, was first submitted together with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. Subsequently, The Professor was resubmitted separately, and reject Rachel’s acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror … it is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a fiend.”With Villette, Charlotte’s works continue to exert a powerful force of brilliant insight, demonstrating just how timeless her works really are. Jane Eyre will always remain my favorite, but I am more pleased than I expected with the experience I had in Villette, and am more of a Brontë fan than ever before. Why 'Jane Eyre' Is Totally Overrated". The Huffington Post. 21 April 2014 . Retrieved 3 February 2016. In 1913, a Belgian doctor and scientist called Paul Heger and his sister Louise donated to the British Library four letters that the novelist Charlotte Brontë had written to their late father, Constantin, in 1844 and 1845, when Constantin was a well-known figure in Brussels and a teacher at the girls’ school owned and run by his wife Zoe. Charlotte and Emily Brontë had been pupils at the Pensionnat Heger in 1842, and Charlotte returned there as a pupil-teacher the following year.

Charlotte and Emily's Belgian essays, juvenilia The History of the Year and Tales of the Islanders, her Preface to Wuthering Heights. The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë by James Tully is a (very) speculative novel about sinister goings-on in the family. Adaptations Wise, Thomas James. 1980. The Brontës: Their lives, friendships, and correspondence. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press. I turned from the group of trees and the ‘merrie companie’ in its shade. Midnight was long past; the concert was over, the crowds were thinning. I followed the ebb. Leaving the radiant park and well-lit Haute-Ville … I sought the dim lower quarter. This surely is romance, is poetry. It is not what has been called the lactea ubertasof George Sand. It does not flow so much as flash. It is more animated than Jeanne; more human and plastic than Lélia. Consuelo comes nearest to it; but even the latter is cold beside it.George Eliot, ed. J.W. Cross. George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals at Project Gutenberg Père Silas: An elderly Catholic priest who makes it his mission, and later M. Emanuel's, to convert Lucy. He is the mentor of Paul Emanuel, and uses the latter's love of the late Justine Marie to manipulate him. He is instrumental in keeping M. Paul and Lucy apart. Brontë's friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell, while not particularly close, was significant in that Gaskell wrote the first biography of Brontë after her death in 1855. And it is perhaps in the union of this self-governing English piety, submissive, practical, a little stern, with her astonishing range and daring as an artist, that one of Charlotte Brontë’s chief spells over the English mind may be said to lie. The truth is, of course, that it is precisely in and through her treatment of passion—mainly, no doubt, as it affects the woman’s heart and life—that she has earned and still maintains her fame. And that brings us to the larger question with which Charlotte Brontë’s triumph as an artist is very closely connected.

You kindly propose to take The Professor into custody. Ah—no! His modest merit shrinks at the thought of going alone and unbefriended to a spirited publisher. The 1944 Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine Jane Eyre ("A love story every woman would die a thousand deaths to live!") is a classic; Zeffirelli's 1996 version, with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg, takes perhaps too much artistic licence for the Brontë-lover. Recommended biography The Professor has now had the honour of being rejected nine times by the ‘Trade.’ (Three rejections go to your own share; you may affirm that you accepted it this last time, but that cannot be admitted; if it were only for the sake of symmetry and effect, I must regard this martyrized MS. as repulsed or at any rate withdrawn for the ninth time!) With regard to the acting of the great, the “possessed” Rachel, it made as deep an impression on Charlotte Brontë, as it produced much about the same time on Matthew Arnold.My expectations, however, are very subdued—very different, I dare say, to what yourswere before you were married. Care and Fear stand so close to Hope, I sometimes scarcely can see her for the shadow they cast. And yet I am thankful too, and the doubtful future must be left with Providence. In Lucy, I think Charlotte is trying to demonstrate to herself, as well as to her readers, the danger of letting logic and reason possess you fully; perhaps this was also Charlotte’s way of reminding herself that it is necessary to let passion and desire in, despite the fears. Tenderness, faith, treason, loneliness, parting, yearning, the fusion of heart with heart and soul with soul, the ineffable illumination that love can give to common things and humble lives,—these, after all, are the perennially interesting things in life; and here the women-novelists are at no disadvantage.

Its merits—I plainly perceive—will never be owned by anybody but Mr. Williams and me; very particular and unique must be our penetration, and I think highly of us both accordingly. You may allege that merit is not visible to the naked eye. Granted; but the smaller the commodity—the more inestimable its value. She fears the deeper parts within herself, which I think is one of the most tragic aspects of the book, for it alters her life and the person she becomes. But it is love as the woman understands it. And here again is their second strength. Their peculiar vision, their omissions quite as much as their assertions, make them welcome. Balzac, Flaubert, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, dissect a complex reality, half physical, half moral; they are students, psychologists, men of science first, poets afterwards. Rachel acted the classical masterpieces; but she acted them as a romantic of the generation of “Hernani”: and it was as a romantic that she laid a fiery hand on Charlotte Brontë. There are so few books, and so many volumes. Among the few stands Villette."— George Henry Lewes [ citation needed]

A struggle to balance reason and passion

Still repeating this word, I turned to my pillow; and still repeating it, I steeped that pillow with tears.”