Villette

Summary

Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham. Some unnamed family calamity then leaves Lucy alone and without means. She serves as companion to the crippled Miss Marchmont, who dies after telling her own story of lost love, and with fifteen pounds Lucy crosses to the Continent. On the boat she meets the pretty, careless Ginevra Fanshawe, a pupil at a girls' school in Villette, capital of the kingdom of Labassecour. Lost in the city at night, Lucy arrives at Madame Beck's pensionnat in the Rue Fossette and is hired, first as nursery governess and then as English teacher. Madame Beck runs her house by quiet surveillance, searching drawers and reading letters. The school's handsome English doctor, Dr. John, is courting Ginevra, who prefers the dandy Colonel de Hamal. Left alone in the empty school through the long vacation with a single disabled pupil, Lucy falls into a nervous collapse; in desperation she confesses to a Catholic priest, Père Silas, and faints in the street. She wakes at La Terrasse in the home of Mrs. Bretton, and learns that Dr. John is Graham Bretton, whom she had recognised weeks before without saying so. Lucy comes to love Graham, buries his letters under an old pear tree when she sees his affection go to Paulina, now grown and reunited with her father, the Count de Bassompierre. The figure of a nun, said to haunt the garden, appears to Lucy several times. Meanwhile the fiery, exacting professor M. Paul Emanuel, Madame Beck's kinsman, quarrels with her, teaches her, and slowly reveals his devotion; their friendship survives a long argument over his Catholic faith and her Protestant one, and the efforts of Madame Beck, Père Silas and the old Madame Walravens to keep them apart. Drugged with an opiate one night, Lucy wanders to a festival in the park and wrongly concludes that Paul will marry his ward. The nun proves to be de Hamal in disguise, who elopes with Ginevra. Before sailing for three years to the West Indies on the Walravens' business, Paul gives Lucy a house and school of her own in the Faubourg Clotilde and asks her to share his life. The three years are the happiest of hers. The last page describes a seven-day Atlantic storm as his ship is due, and leaves the reader to imagine his return. Smith, Elder published the novel in three volumes in January 1853 under the pseudonym Currer Bell. It draws on Brontë's own two years in Brussels at the Pensionnat Héger.

Top Lessons

• Endurance in solitude

  Lucy has no family, money or beauty to lean on, and she says plainly that she must live by her own work. Her endurance is not cheerful, but it is real: she keeps her post, her word and her creed through loneliness that nearly breaks her.

• An unreliable, honest narrator

  Lucy conceals that she has recognised Graham, misleads the reader about her own feelings, and admits it afterwards. Brontë uses this reticence to make us feel how a proud, poor woman guards her inner life, and to make us read more carefully.

• Faith across a divide

  Lucy, a firm Protestant in a Catholic country, and M. Paul, a devout Catholic, argue their faiths and end by respecting each other's sincerity. He asks her to remain a Protestant, and she trusts the goodness she sees in him.

• Hope without guarantee

  The final chapter gives Lucy three years of happiness and then a storm, leaving Paul's fate to the reader. The ending asks whether a life can be counted good when its happiness is brief or uncertain.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Villette is one of the fullest Victorian first-person accounts of depressive collapse. In the long vacation Lucy describes sleeplessness, dread, a sense of fate as her foe and a 'deadlier paralysis' in storms, ending in a faint in the street; Dr. John, a well-drawn young physician, gives the period's standard counsel for low spirits (company, exercise, not being alone) and admits that pill and potion cannot reach 'Hypochondria', a word then covering melancholy as well as health anxiety. Lucy's personifications of Hypochondria and of Despair recur. In Chapter XXXVIII Madame Beck has her given a strong opiate to keep her quiet, and the drug produces excitement and vivid night wandering instead of stupor, a paradoxical reaction Brontë describes closely. Miss Marchmont's invalid years and death, and the disabled pupil left in Lucy's care, add sickroom material. Brontë wrote the book after the deaths of three siblings, and readers have connected Lucy's states with her own letters about low spirits; such links, and any modern diagnosis of Lucy, are interpretive readings.

• Ch. IV

  Lucy nurses the rheumatic invalid Miss Marchmont, hears her story on her last night, and finds her dead in the morning.

• Ch. XV

  The long vacation: Lucy alone with a disabled pupil, then wholly alone, sleepless and despairing, until she confesses at a church and collapses.

• Ch. XVII

  Dr. John questions Lucy about her nervous system and prescribes cheerful society and exercise, conceding the limits of medicine.

• Ch. XXII

  Lucy sees the nun in the garret and Dr. John speaks of spectral illusion as a possible effect of long mental conflict.

• Ch. XXXVIII

  Lucy is given a sweet drink containing a strong opiate; instead of sleep it brings excitement, and she walks out to the moonlit park festival.