Villette is not as often read as Jane Eyre. Many readers, even those who admire Bronte, have no idea she wrote more than one novel. Villette often languishes unread on library shelves, attended to only by graduate students or literary scholars.
Villette is in many ways a difficult novel. There is nothing immediately accessible about the heroine, Lucy Snowe, and the darkness of despair always seems to be lurking under the surface of the narrative, even during happy episodes. The extreme caginess of the narrator, and her unreliability, make the novel different in many ways not only from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre but also many other novels from that time period. Bronte was exploring the literary ideas of point of view and first-person narration, but her work is not experimental. It is masterful in its execution, yet it is not what readers usually expect from a Victorian Gothic novel.
ISBN: 978-1-105-09779-9
- ISBN13 9781105097799
- Publish Date 11 March 2012
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 25 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Lulu.com
- Format eBook (OEB)
- Language English