![]() ![]() She is also, rather judgemental (and you know it’s true when I say it– because struggling with my judgemental streak is a pastime of mine). Lucy Snowe is an orphan, a heroine in some ways similar to Jane Eyre- though far more -introverted. ![]() So perhaps it’s for the best that I only got round to reading Villette now. Of course, Nabokov would tell me that to read to identify yourself with the characters is wrong. I think I would perhaps have enjoyed the book more had I read it a few years back – but more because I would have identified unhealthily with the depressed heroine than anything else. I’ve been planning to read Villette for a long while (more or less 8 years, I think, scarily enough). George Eliot was delighted with Villette and she wrote that “there is something almost prenatural in its power”.īoth of these statements are in their way true, although I would revise Arnold’s to Lucy Snowe’s mind contains “little but hunger, rebellion, and rage”. Matthew Arnold, on the contrary, hated Villette and wrote that the mind of Charlotte Brontë “contained nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage”. ![]() Is it the unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe? The book’s wavering balance between the realist and the supernatural?Ĭharlotte Brontë’s contemporaries could not make up their minds about it. And in some ways, it’s hard to put one’s finger on what’s quite so weird about it. ![]()
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