Based on Charlotte Bronte’s personal experience as a teacher in Brussels. Villette is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude.
Rising above the frustrations of confinement within a rigid social order, it is also a story of a woman’s right to love and be loved.
Villette is really two novels. One is encountered on first reading: a novel of false starts and ambiguous endings, of double names and double identities, setting the bourgeois English Protestant world typified by the Bretton (Briton) household against a different,Catholic bourgeoisie, that of Brussels/ViUette, which holds the promise of change, thrill, love almost by virtue of its foreignness.This Villette offers Gothic excitements and Dickensian coincidences alongside its realism and caution of tone - a novel of some romance to offset its undoubted pain. If the reader wishes to experience this first Villette with innocence unalloyed, s/he should go straight to the first page of the novel, and save this Introduction for the end. Then s/he could go on to the second reading of the novel, the second Villette, a different novel entirely.
INTRODUCTION
VOLUME ONE
Bretton
Paulma
The Playmates
Miss Marcbmont
Turning a New Leaf
London
Villette
Madame Beck
Isidore
Dr Tohn
The Portresse’s Cabinet
The Casket
A Sneeze Out of Season
Tbe Fete
The Long Vacation
VOLUME TWO
Auld Lang Syne
La Terrasse
We Quarrel
The Cleopatra
The Concert
Reaction
The Letter
Vashti
M. de Bassompierre
The Little Countess
A Burial
The Hotel Crecy
VOLUME THREE
The Watchguard
Monsieur’s Fete
M. Paul
The Dryad
The First Letter
M. Paul Keeps His Promise
Malevola
Fraternity
The Apple of Discord
Sunshine
Cloud
Old and New Acquaintance
The Happy Pair
Faubourg Clotilde
Finis
NOTES