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With this book I have now completed my Bronte mission to finish reading all the Bronte books this year. A few days after my course finished, but hey, I got there in the end. This isn't quite as good as Jane Eyre, but it's a bit better than Shirley and a million times better than The Professor. Perhaps in some ways it's taken some elements and ideas out The Professor and made a much more readable book.
I didn't know much about this and the vague ideas I had beforehand seem to have been wrong. I'd gotten it into my head that Vilette was some mansion house (nope, it's a town in Belgium), and that the main character fell in love with a married man... nope.
Lucy Snowe is our main character and narrator, an orphan who has to look after herself as no one else - not even her godmother as nice a character as she is - has the remotest interest in doing. When she comes of age, she goes to work as a companion to an elderly woman, who dies and leaves Lucy back to her wits again. She sets out on an adventure, sailing out to the continent with no plan other than she has nothing to lose, so why not? She bumps into Ginevra Fanshawe aboard the ship, and as chance would have it, she ends up going to Villette to become a teacher at the very school, rich, beautiful, vain bubble head Ginevra is a pupil at. It is run by Madame Beck who could have been head of the Stasi. My god, here is a woman who is cool and pleasant to everyone's face, but constantly and quietly manipulating and digging into everyone's souls. All letters are read, all conversations listened to. On Lucy's first night she calmly looks through Lucy's belongings, thinking she is asleep, and even makes copies of all Lucy's keys so that she will be able to keep up her spying.
Lucy is an oddity in the town and the school, not just because she is a foreigner, but because she has no people, is a protestant in a catholic country, and is cool and aloof towards everyone. I suppose given her circumstances this is a survival technique, but it means that she is alone a lot of the time, and over the first summer the solitude even leads to some kind of breakdown. Dr John, who has been looking after the pupils, finds her and takes her home to recover - what he never realised but Lucy realised straight away but bizarrely decided to keep to herself is that he is the son of her godmother. Why did she never say anything? I've still not settled that in my mind.
There is a dash of the gothic in this tale with the supposed apparitions of a nun in the school grounds. First assumed to be the ghost of a nun buried alive, it is then suggested it might be the ghost of M. Paul's long lost love, and then there was me wondering if it was a representation of Lucy's repressed self, all for the good of being righteous and religious. But no, there's another explanation but I won't throw out too many spoilers here.
M. Paul is I suppose the standard C Bronte hero. About 20 years older than the heroine, a bit of a grump, and in this case prone to diva-like temper tantrums. In his youth he was supposed to marry his love, but her family said no. The girl didn't have the gumption to marry him anyway, but at the same time couldn't marry anyone else, so instead she became a nun for a short period before she died. Since then he's embroiled with her ungrateful family, who fell on hard times. The grandmother is this goblin hunchback covered in jewels, who he supports; then there's also the local priest. And of course his cousin, the manipulative Madame Beck. They all conspire to run his life, for they need a steward to go out to the West Indies to look after the family estate for a few years, then he can come back and marry his young ward and so keep her fortune in the family. They watch with horror as M. Paul and Lucy's friendship developes and see they've got to keep them apart.
So... big spoilers now... did he come back after the three years? She tells of great storms and many wrecks at the time he was supposed to be sailing home, and never actually tells us what happened. But I think she hints at it, only that she does not want to give us such a conclusively depressing end that she does not spell it out: "Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart, leave sunny imaginations hope." (p 462)
Enough said. Also the hint earlier on that she says the three years she was waiting for him were the happiest of her life. She was running her little school, getting his letters and, I guess full of hopeful anticipation. If her story had a happy end, you'd like to think there had been happier years after that.
Perhaps this rather grim end, not spelt out to leave a little hope for the reading public, is reflective of her own one-sided unrequited love for a Belgian professor and the acknowledgement that life isn't fair or always happy.
I didn't know much about this and the vague ideas I had beforehand seem to have been wrong. I'd gotten it into my head that Vilette was some mansion house (nope, it's a town in Belgium), and that the main character fell in love with a married man... nope.
Lucy Snowe is our main character and narrator, an orphan who has to look after herself as no one else - not even her godmother as nice a character as she is - has the remotest interest in doing. When she comes of age, she goes to work as a companion to an elderly woman, who dies and leaves Lucy back to her wits again. She sets out on an adventure, sailing out to the continent with no plan other than she has nothing to lose, so why not? She bumps into Ginevra Fanshawe aboard the ship, and as chance would have it, she ends up going to Villette to become a teacher at the very school, rich, beautiful, vain bubble head Ginevra is a pupil at. It is run by Madame Beck who could have been head of the Stasi. My god, here is a woman who is cool and pleasant to everyone's face, but constantly and quietly manipulating and digging into everyone's souls. All letters are read, all conversations listened to. On Lucy's first night she calmly looks through Lucy's belongings, thinking she is asleep, and even makes copies of all Lucy's keys so that she will be able to keep up her spying.
Lucy is an oddity in the town and the school, not just because she is a foreigner, but because she has no people, is a protestant in a catholic country, and is cool and aloof towards everyone. I suppose given her circumstances this is a survival technique, but it means that she is alone a lot of the time, and over the first summer the solitude even leads to some kind of breakdown. Dr John, who has been looking after the pupils, finds her and takes her home to recover - what he never realised but Lucy realised straight away but bizarrely decided to keep to herself is that he is the son of her godmother. Why did she never say anything? I've still not settled that in my mind.
There is a dash of the gothic in this tale with the supposed apparitions of a nun in the school grounds. First assumed to be the ghost of a nun buried alive, it is then suggested it might be the ghost of M. Paul's long lost love, and then there was me wondering if it was a representation of Lucy's repressed self, all for the good of being righteous and religious. But no, there's another explanation but I won't throw out too many spoilers here.
M. Paul is I suppose the standard C Bronte hero. About 20 years older than the heroine, a bit of a grump, and in this case prone to diva-like temper tantrums. In his youth he was supposed to marry his love, but her family said no. The girl didn't have the gumption to marry him anyway, but at the same time couldn't marry anyone else, so instead she became a nun for a short period before she died. Since then he's embroiled with her ungrateful family, who fell on hard times. The grandmother is this goblin hunchback covered in jewels, who he supports; then there's also the local priest. And of course his cousin, the manipulative Madame Beck. They all conspire to run his life, for they need a steward to go out to the West Indies to look after the family estate for a few years, then he can come back and marry his young ward and so keep her fortune in the family. They watch with horror as M. Paul and Lucy's friendship developes and see they've got to keep them apart.
So... big spoilers now... did he come back after the three years? She tells of great storms and many wrecks at the time he was supposed to be sailing home, and never actually tells us what happened. But I think she hints at it, only that she does not want to give us such a conclusively depressing end that she does not spell it out: "Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart, leave sunny imaginations hope." (p 462)
Enough said. Also the hint earlier on that she says the three years she was waiting for him were the happiest of her life. She was running her little school, getting his letters and, I guess full of hopeful anticipation. If her story had a happy end, you'd like to think there had been happier years after that.
Perhaps this rather grim end, not spelt out to leave a little hope for the reading public, is reflective of her own one-sided unrequited love for a Belgian professor and the acknowledgement that life isn't fair or always happy.