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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Villette,' Charlotte Bront√´ crafts a compelling narrative centered on the experiences of Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman navigating the complexities of love, isolation, and cultural identity in the fictional town of Villette. Employing a rich, introspective literary style, Bront√´ delves deep into Lucy's psyche, exploring themes of feminism, social class, and the constraints placed on women in the 19th century. The novel is notable for its innovative use of stream-of-consciousness and an unreliable narrator, providing a poignant commentary on the search for self within a restrictive society, all set against the backdrop of a vividly depicted Belgian landscape that blurs the lines between reality and imagination. Charlotte Bront√´, an influential figure in Victorian literature, was known for her profound understanding of the struggles faced by women. Her own life experiences'—including her upbringing in the Yorkshire moors, her role as a governess, and her pioneering spirit as a female writer'—deeply informed the personal and psychological nuances found in 'Villette.' Bront√´'s sophisticated exploration of female autonomy and inner conflict reflects her own desire for independence and fulfillment in a patriarchal society. 'Villette' is a must-read for those enamored with the complexities of human emotion and the challenges of societal expectations. Bront√´'s intricate character development and rich narrative will resonate with readers seeking deeper insights into the female experience during the Victorian era. This novel not only stands as a testament to Bront√´'s literary genius but also invites readers to reflect on the timeless struggle for identity and belonging. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Villette
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary Englishwoman steps into a foreign city of bright fêtes and dim corridors, testing whether a guarded heart can survive among watchful eyes and whispered promises.
Villette endures as a classic because it weds psychological candor to formal daring, refusing easy comforts while deepening the reader’s sense of what a nineteenth-century novel can do. Its austere yet intimate voice reshapes the boundaries between confession and reserve, producing a narrative that feels uncannily modern. The book’s meticulously rendered inner life, its moody urban vistas, and its measured confrontation with social and spiritual authority have made it a touchstone for discussions of character, narration, and gender. Its influence persists in literary studies and in fiction that privileges interior experience over spectacle.
Written by Charlotte Brontë and published in 1853, originally under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Villette belongs to the high Victorian period and reflects its transnational horizons. Drawing on Brontë’s time in Brussels, the novel sends its narrator, Lucy Snowe, from England to a French-speaking city—Villette—in the fictional kingdom of Labassecour. There she finds employment at a girls’ school directed with vigilant efficiency by Madame Beck, and becomes acquainted with figures whose temperaments and convictions challenge her own. Without unveiling its developments, the book traces personal and cultural negotiation: work, language, belief, and desire meet in an environment where observation is both protection and peril.
At its core, the novel seeks to portray the construction of selfhood under pressure, especially for a woman whose livelihood depends on discretion, competency, and emotional discipline. It explores what can be voiced and what must be concealed, how memory shapes testimony, and how the imagination compensates for deprivation without deceiving itself. Brontë crafts a protagonist who resists neat explanation, and a narrative that declines to furnish constant reassurance. The result is a study in moral and psychological perseverance—an inquiry into solitude that neither romanticizes suffering nor denies the hunger for connection, and that treats work and conscience as sources of dignity.
Lucy Snowe’s first-person account is remarkable for its blend of candor and restraint. She addresses the reader with a frankness that feels earned, yet she withholds names, motives, and scenes until her memory or courage permits disclosure. This calculated reticence gives the book its unusual pulse, making omission as meaningful as revelation. The narrative also moves between observational clarity and dreamy suggestion, capturing a mind that navigates public performance and private desire. Such techniques invite active reading: we assemble character from hints, interpret silences, and learn to accept uncertainty as a principle rather than a flaw. The effect is quietly exhilarating.
The city of Villette itself is a character—brisk, theatrical, and occasionally disorienting. Streets that gleam during festivals become cryptic after midnight; classrooms turn into stages of rivalry, surveillance, and unexpected tenderness. The girls’ pensionnat, presided over by the methodical Madame Beck, is a world of routine and scrutiny where letters, timetables, and glances matter. Against this controlled environment, rumors gather and a spectral figure appears at the edges of perception, threading Gothic atmosphere through realist scenes. The contrast between bright public spaces and shadowed private corners mirrors Lucy’s internal weather, as well as the novel’s ongoing argument about appearance, truth, and self-command.
Work, in Villette, is both necessity and vocation. Brontë treats the classroom as a crucible where discipline, ambition, and affection collide, and where a woman’s intellectual labor earns precarious independence. The novel examines the social codes that constrict female mobility—how respectability can smother individuality, and how professional competence can be doubly judged. Yet it also grants its protagonist a practical resourcefulness, charting how attention, patience, and study become instruments of self-respect. Romance is not the engine here; survival and integrity are. The emphasis on economic and emotional self-reliance gives the book a bracing honesty that still resonates.
Religion in the novel is not mere backdrop but an arena where conscience, culture, and authority contend. Lucy’s Protestant sensibility meets continental Catholic ritual, producing moments of fascination, misunderstanding, and principled debate. Brontë’s portrayal interrogates institutions and personal belief without reducing either to caricature, asking what it means to choose one’s own moral compass amid pressure to conform. The spiritual dimension also intensifies the psychological one: confession and concealment, faith and doubt, ceremony and silence echo the novel’s narrative structure. Through these tensions, Villette meditates on inner freedom—how conviction might be held without harshness, and how charity might coexist with independence.
Language functions as both barrier and bridge. Brontë threads substantial French into the text, trusting readers to feel and navigate the friction of multilingual life. The choice underscores Lucy’s outsider status and dramatizes how thought adapts under linguistic strain. Misunderstandings, jokes, and subtle power plays hinge on wording, accent, and translation. This bilingual texture is not simply decorative; it shapes the novel’s ethics of attention. To listen closely becomes a form of respect and a method of survival. In presenting foreignness as a daily practice rather than a spectacle, Villette anticipates more contemporary explorations of migration, code-switching, and cultural negotiation.
Historically, the novel stands at a crossroads between the expansive social canvas of earlier Victorian fiction and later experiments in psychological depth. Its controlled perspective, strategic ambiguity, and insistence on interior complexity have made it a frequent subject of scholarly debate and a mainstay in university curricula. Readers and critics have found in it a predecessor to modern concerns with unreliable narration and the politics of voice. Without overt manifesto, Villette enlarges the possibilities of how a life might be told—especially a woman’s life—insisting that subtle shifts of feeling, belief, and perception are worthy of narrative grandeur.
Part of the book’s power lies in its atmosphere: brisk days of lessons and errands give way to nights textured with rumor, memory, and a touch of the uncanny. The pacing is contemplative, the scenes carefully layered so that minor details carry delayed consequence. Brontë’s prose tempers austerity with flashes of irony and warmth, reflecting a mind that observes keenly yet rarely indulges in melodrama. The novel refuses easy symmetry, preferring the jagged rhythms of lived experience. That choice sustains a tension between hunger and restraint, reminding readers that courage sometimes appears as quiet persistence rather than spectacle.
To read Villette today is to encounter a lucid, unsentimental meditation on solitude, work, desire, language, faith, and the cost of self-possession. It speaks to anyone who has crossed borders—geographical, social, or emotional—and found that identity must be assembled patiently from fragments. Its themes remain urgent: the value of privacy, the ethics of attention, and the forming of conscience amid competing loyalties. Brontë’s achievement is to make interior life adventurous, and to honor ambiguity without surrendering clarity. The novel’s lasting appeal lies in that balance, drawing contemporary readers into an intimate struggle whose quiet victories feel hard-won and luminous.
Synopsis
Villette follows Lucy Snowe, a reserved English girl introduced in a quiet provincial home. As a child, she briefly lodges with the Bretton family, observing the kind Mrs. Bretton, her lively son, and a sensitive visiting child called Polly. Circumstances soon separate them, and Lucy passes into an adulthood marked by self-reliance and few resources. The narrative, told from her perspective, emphasizes watchfulness, composure, and an inward strength cultivated through solitude. Early chapters set a foundation of memory and observation that later shapes Lucy’s choices, while the parting of companions hints at future crossings of paths in unexpected settings.
Facing financial uncertainty and without close kin, Lucy leaves England to seek employment on the Continent. She endures a rough sea voyage and arrives in the city of Villette, in the kingdom of Labassecour. By chance and initiative, she finds her way to Madame Beck’s girls’ school and secures a place first as a nursemaid and then, owing to her English and composure, as a teacher. The school’s ordered routine offers stability, yet also exposes Lucy to unfamiliar customs, a foreign tongue, and a setting where her privacy is guarded more by restraint than by trust.
Life at Madame Beck’s pensionnat unfolds under vigilant management. Madame Beck, practical and shrewd, keeps close watch over staff and pupils, sometimes testing loyalty without announcement. Lucy, Protestant among predominantly Catholic influences, maintains reserve, navigating doctrinal and social differences with caution. Ginevra Fanshawe, a fashionable student, embodies levity and flirtation, offering contrast to Lucy’s steadiness. Amid lessons, examinations, and evening study, whispered tales circulate of a spectral nun said to haunt the premises. Whether superstition or symbol, the rumor intensifies the atmosphere of secrecy, while Lucy’s quiet diligence establishes her place in the school without inviting undue scrutiny.
Beyond the classroom, public entertainments and city festivals draw Lucy into wider Villette. At a crowded performance, she experiences a collapse brought on by strain, and is aided by an English physician whose manner, letters, and subsequent visits develop into a considerate friendship. Over time, she discerns that he is linked to her earlier life, a recognition that complicates her sense of detachment. Meanwhile, Ginevra entertains attentions from a fashionable admirer, pursuing display and diversion. Lucy reads, writes, and observes, keeping counsel with herself, while the doctor’s kindness offers companionship that steadies her without altering her fundamental habit of independence.
A stretch of summer isolation at the school brings Lucy to a crisis of health and despondency. Unexpected assistance restores her in an English household abroad, where considerate care, ordered days, and thoughtful letters help recover her strength. In this interval, she weighs her attachments and the risk of forming hopes in a setting shaped by chance encounters and shifting fortunes. Returning to Madame Beck’s, Lucy resumes teaching with renewed discipline. The rhythm of lessons and the balance of duties restore her composure, even as friendly relations in the city continue to evolve. She acknowledges patterns of affection around her, yet keeps her own counsel.
The arrival of Paulina Home, now poised and self-possessed, reintroduces a figure from Lucy’s youth. Paulina’s father, recently ennobled, establishes a household in Villette; their presence bridges past and present. An English friend of Lucy’s, long known to Paulina, renews acquaintance, and their understanding deepens in a manner apparent to observant eyes. Lucy, watchful yet restrained, adjusts to shifting circles of intimacy with equanimity. Ginevra, meanwhile, pursues glittering prospects on her own terms. The narrative follows these intersecting courses without haste, presenting the growth of characters as they find stations suited to temperament, fortune, and long-standing inclinations.
M. Paul Emanuel, a rigorous professor associated with the pensionnat, becomes central to Lucy’s professional life. Abrupt and exacting, he disputes and guides with equal fervor, drawing out Lucy’s intellectual resolve. A school fête, including a dramatic performance, tests her nerve and skill under his direction. Around them, influences converge: Madame Beck’s watchfulness, the counsel of a clerical adviser, and the city’s religious atmosphere shape expectations and impose constraints. Lucy, firm in conscience, resists pressure to bend her convictions. Through instruction, conflict, and small generosities, M. Paul’s character emerges as disciplined yet compassionate, attentive to Lucy’s capacity and prospects.
As seasons pass, Lucy’s bond with M. Paul develops through study, mutual respect, and quiet encouragement. He furnishes her with books, a tranquil workroom, and opportunities to direct classes, strengthening her professional standing. Yet obstacles remain: institutional interests, private vows, and personal obligations place barriers between inclination and fulfillment. The legend of the school’s nun recurs in moments of strain, intensifying uncertainty without a definitive resolution. Within this guarded space, Lucy’s ambitions sharpen. A discreet benefactor supports her plans, and the garden, classrooms, and city streets become sites where work, restraint, and guarded hope shape the course of daily life.
The closing movement centers on independence and trust. With M. Paul’s practical aid, Lucy prepares to establish her own school, envisioning a livelihood grounded in effort rather than contingency. A necessary journey calls him away for an extended term, and a patient interval begins, marked by letters, work, and the slow growth of a modest enterprise. The narrative concludes without insisting on a single outcome, balancing expectation with uncertainty. Throughout, the book presents endurance, conscience, and self-command as steady guides. Within a foreign city, Lucy fashions belonging from vocation and integrity, embodying a tempered hope that does not depend on spectacle or acclaim.
Historical Context
Villette unfolds in the fictional city of Villette, capital of the kingdom of Labassecour, a transparent stand-in for Brussels in the newly independent Belgium. The narrative’s implied timeframe runs from the late 1830s into the mid-1840s, years when a Catholic, francophone elite shaped civic life and education. The urban topography evokes Brussels’s parks, convents, and boarding schools, as well as a lively theatre and boulevard culture. Against this continental backdrop, Lucy Snowe’s English Protestant identity sharpens contrasts in language, creed, manners, and policing. The setting places private dramas within a public sphere marked by nation-building, surveillance, and religious institutions embedded in daily life.
The city’s atmosphere reflects a compact European capital undergoing rapid modernization. Belgium’s early railway network, gas-lit streets, and thriving commercial quarters framed the rhythm of work and leisure. French predominated in administration and elite society, though Dutch was widely spoken beyond salons and schools. Catholic churches and charitable associations dominated education and welfare, and municipal order was maintained by gendarmes and an alert bureaucracy. In this milieu, a girls’ pensionnat could flourish under clerical influence, while public entertainments at the theatre mirrored the prestige of francophone high culture. The time and place give the novel its distinctive mix of cosmopolitan polish and intimate, regulated enclosures.
The Belgian Revolution of 1830, culminating in independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, is the foundational event behind Labassecour’s political ambience. After the Congress of Vienna (1815) united the southern and northern Netherlands, southern grievances fermented over language policy, religion, and representation. On 25 August 1830, a performance of La Muette de Portici at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels became the spark for street riots, which swelled into an insurrection. A Provisional Government proclaimed independence on 4 October 1830. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg accepted the crown as Leopold I and took the oath on 21 July 1831. The new kingdom resisted William I’s Ten Days’ Campaign in August 1831, aided indirectly by France; Antwerp’s citadel fell after a French siege in late 1832 led by Marshal Gérard. The London Conference of 1830–1831, and finally the Treaty of London (1839), secured international recognition and guaranteed Belgian neutrality, while partitioning parts of Luxembourg and Limburg. The revolution left a compact capital with heightened civic vigilance, a constitution that protected religion and education, and a political class sensitive to public order. Villette’s city festivals, official parades, and the omnipresent guard reflect this post-revolutionary culture of cautious celebration. Lucy’s movements through parks, lit streets, and regulated school spaces read against the memory of recent upheaval, in which a theatre sparked crowds and a new state learned to discipline them.
Belgium’s 1831 Constitution established a liberal, constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature and strong guarantees for press, religion, association, and education. Leopold I’s reign (1831–1865) oversaw cautious nation-building and coalition politics alternating between Catholic and Liberal ministries. Early leaders such as Charles Rogier (premier 1832–1834, 1847–1852) and Jean-Baptiste Nothomb (1841–1845) navigated clerical influence, economic growth, and public order. The 1839 Treaty of London finalized borders and neutrality, anchoring diplomatic sensitivity to internal peace. Villette echoes this equilibrium: a visible monarchy, a deferential civic tone, and disciplined policing. The school’s regulation and the city’s orderly spectacles mirror a small state invested in stability after revolution.
Freedom of education, guaranteed by the 1831 Constitution, enabled Catholic congregations and lay Catholics to dominate schooling in the 1830s–1840s. The Society of Jesus, restored in 1814, ran influential colleges in cities such as Namur, Brussels, and Liège, while female orders like the Ursulines expanded girls’ instruction. Parish charities and sodalities linked pedagogy with moral oversight. This framework shaped a network of pensionnats where religious discipline and surveillance coexisted with high achievement in modern languages and music. Villette’s pensionnat under Madame Beck, guided and occasionally inspected by clergy, reflects this ecology: rigorous hours, confessional boundaries, and an ethic of pastoral authority that pervades both the classroom and domestic life.
Across the Channel, Protestant–Catholic tensions provided a charged backdrop for British readers. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 ended most civil disabilities, yet suspicion of Rome persisted, erupting again during the 1850 restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England, derided as Papal Aggression. Protestant societies warned against Jesuit influence in education and politics. These debates informed English perceptions of Catholic Belgium as confessional and clandestine. Villette, written in 1853 but set earlier, channels this climate through Lucy’s Protestant conscience, wary of Jesuit casuistry and confessionals. Her resistance to conversion and skepticism toward clerical authority situate the novel within contemporaneous British controversies over conscience, authority, and national identity.
The revolutions of 1848 swept France, the German states, the Habsburg lands, and parts of Italy, toppling regimes and provoking counterrevolution. Belgium, buffered by diplomatic guarantees and a cautious government, avoided large-scale revolt, yet authorities tightened policing, monitored associations, and managed refugees. Public gatherings, festivals, and theatres carried a renewed political charge, while the press navigated official vigilance. Villette’s street scenes, fêtes, and the experienced presence of gendarmes evoke a city alert to crowds and contagion of unrest. Lucy’s nocturnal wanderings and the careful choreography of public spectacle replicate a post-1848 urban grammar where order, entertainment, and surveillance interpenetrate the lives of residents and strangers.
The British Industrial Revolution, especially in Yorkshire’s woollen and worsted districts (Leeds, Bradford, Halifax), transformed work and family economies by the 1830s–1840s. Factory Acts in 1833 and 1844 began regulating hours and child labor, while industrial cycles produced insecurity for middling families. Respectable but poorly endowed women increasingly sought employment as governesses or schoolteachers, often for modest wages. This social economy sent Englishwomen to the Continent, where language schools and pensionnats needed Anglophone staff. Villette absorbs this context: Lucy’s migration, economic precarity, and pedagogical skill reflect the intersection of industrial capitalism, gendered labor markets, and the perceived cultural value of English language instruction in European urban schools.
The governess and teacher labor market crystallized in mid-century Britain, with the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution established in London in 1841 to aid distressed professionals. Typical annual wages for a resident governess ranged between 20 and 40 pounds, often without long-term security or prospects. Educational reforms lagged for women, pushing them toward private households or foreign schools. References and naturalized manners determined employability as much as certificates. Villette reproduces these realities: Lucy’s reliance on character, languages, and discreet self-presentation; the fragility of her income; and the ambiguous status of the resident teacher within a domestic-institutional hybrid. The novel’s attention to wages, rooms, and duty hours stems from this material culture.
Language politics in Belgium after 1830 privileged French in administration, justice, and elite education, despite a majority Dutch-speaking population in Flanders. Early Flemish activists, notably Jan Frans Willems (1793–1846), campaigned for recognition of Dutch, publishing histories and organizing cultural societies. Petitions in the 1840s urged broader legal use of Dutch, though substantial reforms lay decades ahead. Linguistic hierarchy intertwined with class and access to institutions. Villette’s emphasis on French as the credential for school advancement, code-switching in classrooms, and Lucy’s arduous acquisition of idiom dramatize language as a gatekeeping mechanism. The novel’s comedic and tense episodes of misunderstanding carry sharp historical resonance.
Brussels’s theatrical life, centered on venues like the Théâtre de la Monnaie, projected francophone prestige and drew touring stars. The stage had political memory, given 1830’s revolutionary spark at La Muette de Portici. In the 1840s the celebrated tragedienne Rachel Félix, known simply as Rachel, electrified audiences with classical roles; she performed in Brussels in 1844. Villette’s terrifying, sublime actress Vashti evokes this era’s star culture, the physicality of tragic performance, and the theatre’s capacity to move crowds. The novel connects urban spectatorship, female charisma, and moral anxiety to a city where art, history, and civic feeling had already proven combustible.
Continental policing in the 1830s–1840s relied on gendarmes, municipal police, and bureaucratic controls over foreigners and associations. Passport regimes, inherited from Napoleonic practice, remained common and were only gradually liberalized later in the century. Belgium balanced hospitality to travelers with vigilance shaped by recent revolution and fears of cross-border agitation. Villette’s atmosphere of watching and being watched—Madame Beck’s surveillance, inspections, and discreet searches—echoes this broader culture of order. Lucy’s arrival as a solitary foreign woman entails encounters with officials and institutional rules that shadow her independence. The novel translates the state’s regulatory reflex into the micro-politics of a school and household.
Belgium built the first public railway on the European continent, inaugurating the Brussels–Mechelen line on 5 May 1835 and rapidly extending routes to Antwerp, Ghent, and Liège by the early 1840s. Steam packets linked Ostend and Antwerp to British ports, easing trans-Channel travel. This transport revolution shrank distances, facilitated tourism, and enabled labor mobility for teachers and governesses. Villette presupposes these corridors: Lucy’s journey by sea and rail, swift communications, and the possibility of regular returns or separations structured by timetables. The novel’s tempo of arrivals, departures, and chance meetings belongs to a logistical world newly knit together by iron tracks and scheduled steamships.
The French Antilles, notably Guadeloupe with its chief town Basse-Terre, formed part of the mid-century Atlantic sugar economy. Plantation labor had been enslaved until the French Provisional Government decreed abolition on 27 April 1848, championed by Victor Schœlcher; emancipation was implemented that year in the colonies. The region also endured natural disasters, including the catastrophic Guadeloupe earthquake of 8 February 1843. Villette sends M. Paul to the Antilles for a three-year term to secure independence and fortune, aligning his fate with a volatile colonial world of trade, storms, and moral ambiguity. The novel’s taciturn handling of labor relations underscores contemporary European distance from colonial realities.
Cholera pandemics struck Europe repeatedly, with major outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 affecting Belgian cities, including Brussels. Urban density, limited sanitation, and migration intensified risk, prompting boards of health and sanitary campaigns that slowly improved water and waste systems. Fever, convalescence, and the mental effects of isolation became familiar experiences in crowded capitals. Villette transforms public health into personal crisis: Lucy’s summer collapse, hallucination-like wanderings, and fragile recovery suggest how illness threads through urban solitude and institutional life. While the text does not name cholera, its evocation of debility and fear resonates with a generation for whom epidemic time shaped movement, work, and the intimacies of care.
Villette functions as a social critique by anatomizing the precarious station of educated, single women within intersecting systems of religion, education, and wage labor. The pensionnat’s regime exposes how authority cloaks itself in benevolence while governing bodies and clerical agents set boundaries on female agency. Lucy’s salaries, lodging, and limited prospects exemplify structural dependency that respectability both demands and punishes. Her Protestant dissent, moderated yet firm, articulates a defense of conscience against institutional pressure. Through meticulous attention to economies of room, time, and surveillance, the book reveals how order, ostensibly for safety and virtue, exacts psychological costs and curtails reciprocal recognition.
Politically, the novel shadows a small state’s obsession with stability—police presence, curated spectacle, and confessional schooling—and quietly questions their human toll. It exposes class stratification in the microcosm of the school, where lineage and patronage trump merit, while the city’s theatres and fêtes double as instruments of social cohesion. The colonial subplot foregrounds the moral evasions of metropolitan prosperity tied to distant plantations and perilous seas. By making language a regime of power and religion a vehicle of discipline, Villette dramatizes the contradictions of a Europe proud of liberty yet practiced in soft coercion. Its critique lies in showing how inward lives resist such enclosures.
Author Biography
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was an English novelist of the early Victorian period, best known for Jane Eyre. Publishing initially under the pseudonym Currer Bell, she helped reshape the nineteenth-century novel with an intense first-person voice, psychological depth, and moral seriousness. Her work blends realist observation with Gothic atmosphere and explores class, gender, and work in industrial-age Britain. Active chiefly in the 1840s and early 1850s, she moved from juvenilia shared with her siblings to mature fiction that achieved wide readership and controversy. Today she stands as a central figure in British literature, studied for narrative innovation and for opening new imaginative space for women protagonists.
Brontë grew up in Yorkshire, in an environment that fostered reading and imaginative play. With her siblings, she produced elaborate juvenilia set in invented realms often called Glass Town and Angria, exercises that trained her in plotting, character, and voice. Her formal schooling included a difficult period at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, later echoed in fiction, and later study at Roe Head, where she excelled in languages and composition. She continued to educate herself through voracious reading of periodicals and canonical authors. These experiences supplied the disciplined habits and literary ambition that would structure her transition from youthful manuscripts to professional authorship.
In the 1830s and early 1840s, Brontë worked as a teacher and as a governess, occupations typical for educated women seeking income. Hoping to create a sustainable career, she attempted, without success, to establish a small school. Seeking further training, she traveled to Brussels in the early 1840s to study languages at a girls’ boarding school, where she also taught. Exposure to continental pedagogy and literature, and to a cosmopolitan cityscape, broadened her stylistic range and informed later settings and character psychology. The discipline of writing essays in French and the mentorship she received there left a lasting mark on her prose and narrative technique.
Brontë’s first appearance in print came with Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a jointly issued volume in the mid-1840s that sold poorly but declared serious intent. She completed The Professor soon after, but publishers declined it. Undeterred, she retained the neutral pen name Currer Bell and wrote Jane Eyre, released in the late 1840s to immediate notoriety and strong sales. Reviewers praised its vitality and moral force while debating its propriety and authorship, given the concealment of identity. The success established her as a major novelist and allowed her to negotiate more confidently with publishers and to participate, cautiously, in London’s literary world.
She followed Jane Eyre with Shirley, set in Yorkshire during the early industrial unrest, a novel attentive to regional life, commerce, and women’s social constraints. It was received as ambitious and topical. Villette, published in the early 1850s, returned to a fictionalized Belgian setting to examine solitude, faith, and desire with striking psychological acuity. The Professor, her earlier, leaner study of work and vocation, appeared posthumously and has since been read as a bridge to the later masterpieces. Across these works she wrote mainly realist fiction infused with romantic and Gothic elements, exploring education, labor, class mobility, and the moral development of a determined, self-aware protagonist.
Brontë’s artistic convictions favored sincerity, moral clarity, and a disciplined imagination over mere sensational effect. Educated on the British Romantics and historical novelists, and sharpened by rigorous language study, she crafted a first-person idiom that insists on inner authority for women characters. Her heroines seek intellectual respect, economic independence, and ethical self-possession within constraining institutions. Contemporary readers recognized the boldness of centering a plain, working woman as narrator and moral agent. While not an activist in public life, she engaged prevailing debates about education, religion, and the marriage market through narrative drama, shaping a discourse on women’s autonomy that continues to inform critical discussion.
In her later years Brontë enjoyed growing prestige, visited London to meet publishers and fellow writers, and, after a period of intense work, married Arthur Bell Nicholls in the mid-1850s. She died not long afterward, and was buried in Yorkshire. Posthumous editions consolidated her canon, including publication of The Professor and an unfinished fragment often titled Emma. Her reputation has remained vigorous, attracting readings from feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial perspectives, and inspiring countless adaptations for stage and screen. Today her novels are valued for narrative innovation, ethical urgency, and their probing of power, feeling, and belief in a rapidly changing society.
Villette
Chapter I. Bretton.
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace — Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.
When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street[1], where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide — so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement — these things pleased me well.
One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman.
She was not young, as I remember her, but she was still handsome, tall, well-made, and though dark for an Englishwoman, yet wearing always the clearness of health in her brunette cheek, and its vivacity in a pair of fine, cheerful black eyes. People esteemed it a grievous pity that she had not conferred her complexion on her son, whose eyes were blue — though, even in boyhood, very piercing — and the colour of his long hair such as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother’s features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full-grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune to the possessor.
In the autumn of the year — — I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society.
Time always flowed smoothly for me at my godmother’s side; not with tumultuous swiftness, but blandly, like the gliding of a full river through a plain. My visits to her resembled the sojourn of Christian and Hopeful beside a certain pleasant stream, with “green trees on each bank, and meadows beautified with lilies all the year round.” The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and wished rather it had still held aloof.
One day a letter was received of which the contents evidently caused Mrs. Bretton surprise and some concern. I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication: to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed to pass.
The next day, on my return from a long walk, I found, as I entered my bedroom, an unexpected change. In, addition to my own French bed in its shady recess, appeared in a corner a small crib, draped with white; and in addition to my mahogany chest of drawers, I saw a tiny rosewood chest. I stood still, gazed, and considered.
“Of what are these things the signs and tokens?” I asked. The answer was obvious. “A second guest is coming: Mrs. Bretton expects other visitors.”
On descending to dinner, explanations ensued. A little girl, I was told, would shortly be my companion: the daughter of a friend and distant relation of the late Dr. Bretton’s. This little girl, it was added, had recently lost her mother; though, indeed, Mrs. Bretton ere long subjoined, the loss was not so great as might at first appear. Mrs. Home (Home it seems was the name) had been a very pretty, but a giddy, careless woman, who had neglected her child, and disappointed and disheartened her husband. So far from congenial had the union proved, that separation at last ensued — separation by mutual consent, not after any legal process. Soon after this event, the lady having over-exerted herself at a ball, caught cold, took a fever, and died after a very brief illness. Her husband, naturally a man of very sensitive feelings, and shocked inexpressibly by too sudden communication of the news, could hardly, it seems, now be persuaded but that some over-severity on his part — some deficiency in patience and indulgence — had contributed to hasten her end. He had brooded over this idea till his spirits were seriously affected; the medical men insisted on travelling being tried as a remedy, and meanwhile Mrs. Bretton had offered to take charge of his little girl. “And I hope,” added my godmother in conclusion, “the child will not be like her mamma; as silly and frivolous a little flirt as ever sensible man was weak enough to marry. For,” said she, “Mr. Home is a sensible man in his way, though not very practical: he is fond of science, and lives half his life in a laboratory trying experiments — a thing his butterfly wife could neither comprehend nor endure; and indeed” confessed my godmother, “I should not have liked it myself.”
In answer to a question of mine, she further informed me that her late husband used to say, Mr. Home had derived this scientific turn from a maternal uncle, a French savant; for he came, it seems; of mixed French and Scottish origin, and had connections now living in France, of whom more than one wrote de before his name, and called himself noble.
That same evening at nine o’clock, a servant was despatched to meet the coach by which our little visitor was expected. Mrs. Bretton and I sat alone in the drawing-room waiting her coming; John Graham Bretton being absent on a visit to one of his schoolfellows who lived in the country. My godmother read the evening paper while she waited; I sewed. It was a wet night; the rain lashed the panes, and the wind sounded angry and restless.
“Poor child!” said Mrs. Bretton from time to time. “What weather for her journey! I wish she were safe here.”
A little before ten the doorbell announced Warren’s return. No sooner was the door opened than I ran down into the hall; there lay a trunk and some bandboxes, beside them stood a person like a nurse-girl, and at the foot of the staircase was Warren with a shawled bundle in his arms.
“Is that the child?” I asked.
“Yes, miss.”
I would have opened the shawl, and tried to get a peep at the face, but it was hastily turned from me to Warren’s shoulder.
“Put me down, please,” said a small voice when Warren opened the drawing-room door, “and take off this shawl,” continued the speaker, extracting with its minute hand the pin, and with a sort of fastidious haste doffing the clumsy wrapping. The creature which now appeared made a deft attempt to fold the shawl; but the drapery was much too heavy and large to be sustained or wielded by those hands and arms. “Give it to Harriet, please,” was then the direction, “and she can put it away.” This said, it turned and fixed its eyes on Mrs. Bretton.
“Come here, little dear,” said that lady. “Come and let me see if you are cold and damp: come and let me warm you at the fire.”
The child advanced promptly. Relieved of her wrapping, she appeared exceedingly tiny; but was a neat, completely-fashioned little figure, light, slight, and straight. Seated on my godmother’s ample lap, she looked a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax, her head of silky curls, increased, I thought, the resemblance.
Mrs. Bretton talked in little fond phrases as she chafed the child’s hands, arms, and feet; first she was considered with a wistful gaze, but soon a smile answered her. Mrs. Bretton was not generally a caressing woman: even with her deeply-cherished son, her manner was rarely sentimental, often the reverse; but when the small stranger smiled at her, she kissed it, asking, “What is my little one’s name?”
“Missy.”
“But besides Missy?”
“Polly, papa calls her.”
“Will Polly be content to live with me?”
“Not always; but till papa comes home. Papa is gone away.” She shook her head expressively.
“He will return to Polly, or send for her.”
“Will he, ma’am? Do you know he will?”
“I think so.”
“But Harriet thinks not: at least not for a long while. He is ill.”
Her eyes filled. She drew her hand from Mrs. Bretton’s and made a movement to leave her lap; it was at first resisted, but she said — “Please, I wish to go: I can sit on a stool.”
She was allowed to slip down from the knee, and taking a footstool, she carried it to a corner where the shade was deep, and there seated herself. Mrs. Bretton, though a commanding, and in grave matters even a peremptory woman, was often passive in trifles: she allowed the child her way. She said to me, “Take no notice at present.” But I did take notice: I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint; but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion. Mrs. Bretton did not hear it: which was quite as well. Ere long, a voice, issuing from the corner, demanded — “May the bell be rung for Harriet!”
I rang; the nurse was summoned and came.
“Harriet, I must be put to bed,” said her little mistress. “You must ask where my bed is.”
Harriet signified that she had already made that inquiry.
“Ask if you sleep with me, Harriet.”
“No, Missy,” said the nurse: “you are to share this young lady’s room,” designating me.
Missy did not leave her seat, but I saw her eyes seek me. After some minutes’ silent scrutiny, she emerged from her corner.
“I wish you, ma’am, good night,” said she to Mrs. Bretton; but she passed me mute.
“Goodnight, Polly,” I said.
“No need to say goodnight, since we sleep in the same chamber,” was the reply, with which she vanished from the drawing-room. We heard Harriet propose to carry her upstairs. “No need,” was again her answer — “no need, no need:” and her small step toiled wearily up the staircase.
On going to bed an hour afterwards, I found her still wide awake. She had arranged her pillows so as to support her little person in a sitting posture: her hands, placed one within the other, rested quietly on the sheet, with an old-fashioned calm most unchildlike. I abstained from speaking to her for some time, but just before extinguishing the light, I recommended her to lie down.
“By and by,” was the answer.
“But you will take cold, Missy.”
She took some tiny article of raiment from the chair at her crib side, and with it covered her shoulders. I suffered her to do as she pleased. Listening awhile in the darkness, I was aware that she still wept, — wept under restraint, quietly and cautiously.
On awaking with daylight, a trickling of water caught my ear. Behold! there she was risen and mounted on a stool near the washstand, with pains and difficulty inclining the ewer (which she could not lift) so as to pour its contents into the basin. It was curious to watch her as she washed and dressed, so small, busy, and noiseless. Evidently she was little accustomed to perform her own toilet; and the buttons, strings, hooks and eyes, offered difficulties which she encountered with a perseverance good to witness. She folded her night-dress, she smoothed the drapery of her couch quite neatly; withdrawing into a corner, where the sweep of the white curtain concealed her, she became still. I half rose, and advanced my, head to see how she was occupied. On her knees, with her forehead bent on her hands, I perceived that she was praying.
Her nurse tapped at the door. She started up.
“I am dressed, Harriet,” said she; “I have dressed myself, but I do not feel neat. Make me neat!”
“Why did you dress yourself, Missy?”
“Hush! speak low, Harriet, for fear of waking the girl” (meaning me, who now lay with my eyes shut). “I dressed myself to learn, against the time you leave me.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“When you are cross, I have many a time wanted you to go, but not now.
Tie my sash straight; make my hair smooth, please.”
“Your sash is straight enough. What a particular little body you are!”
“It must be tied again. Please to tie it.”
“There, then. When I am gone you must get that young lady to dress you.”
“On no account.”
“Why? She is a very nice young lady. I hope you mean to behave prettily to her, Missy, and not show your airs.”
“She shall dress me on no account.”
“Comical little thing!”
“You are not passing the comb straight through my hair, Harriet; the line will be crooked.”
“Ay, you are ill to please. Does that suit?”
“Pretty well. Where should I go now that I am dressed?”
“I will take you into the breakfast-room.”
“Come, then.”
They proceeded to the door. She stopped.
“Oh! Harriet, I wish this was papa’s house! I don’t know these people.”
“Be a good child, Missy.”
“I am good, but I ache here;” putting her hand to her heart, and moaning while she reiterated, “Papa! papa!”
I roused myself and started up, to check this scene while it was yet within bounds.
“Say good-morning to the young lady,” dictated Harriet. She said, “Good-morning,” and then followed her nurse from the room. Harriet temporarily left that same day, to go to her own friends, who lived in the neighbourhood.
On descending, I found Paulina (the child called herself Polly, but her full name was Paulina Mary) seated at the breakfast-table, by Mrs. Bretton’s side; a mug of milk stood before her, a morsel of bread filled her hand, which lay passive on the tablecloth: she was not eating.
“How we shall conciliate this little creature,” said Mrs. Bretton to me, “I don’t know: she tastes nothing, and by her looks, she has not slept.”
I expressed my confidence in the effects of time and kindness.
“If she were to take a fancy to anybody in the house, she would soon settle; but not till then,” replied Mrs. Bretton.
Chapter II. Paulina.
Some days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort — to tranquillity even — than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one’s eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe’s antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination[2]; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.
And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld her figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast — some precocious fanatic or untimely saint — I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.
I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, “Papa; my dear papa!” This, I perceived, was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.
What might have been the end of this fretting, had it continued unchecked, can only be conjectured: it received, however, a sudden turn.
One afternoon, Mrs. Bretton, coaxing her from her usual station in a corner, had lifted her into the window-seat, and, by way of occupying her attention, told her to watch the passengers and count how many ladies should go down the street in a given time. She had sat listlessly, hardly looking, and not counting, when — my eye being fixed on hers — I witnessed in its iris and pupil a startling transfiguration. These sudden, dangerous natures — sensitive as they are called — offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their angular vagaries. The fixed and heavy gaze swum, trembled, then glittered in fire; the small, overcast brow cleared; the trivial and dejected features lit up; the sad countenance vanished, and in its place appeared a sudden eagerness, an intense expectancy. “It is!” were her words.
Like a bird or a shaft, or any other swift thing, she was gone from the room, How she got the house-door open I cannot tell; probably it might be ajar; perhaps Warren was in the way and obeyed her behest, which would be impetuous enough. I — watching calmly from the window — saw her, in her black frock and tiny braided apron (to pinafores she had an antipathy), dart half the length of the street; and, as I was on the point of turning, and quietly announcing to Mrs. Bretton that the child was run out mad, and ought instantly to be pursued, I saw her caught up, and rapt at once from my cool observation, and from the wondering stare of the passengers. A gentleman had done this good turn, and now, covering her with his cloak, advanced to restore her to the house whence he had seen her issue.
I concluded he would leave her in a servant’s charge and withdraw; but he entered: having tarried a little while below, he came upstairs.
His reception immediately explained that he was known to Mrs. Bretton. She recognised him; she greeted him, and yet she was fluttered, surprised, taken unawares. Her look and manner were even expostulatory; and in reply to these, rather than her words, he said, — “I could not help it, madam: I found it impossible to leave the country without seeing with my own eyes how she settled.”
“But you will unsettle her.”
“I hope not. And how is papa’s little Polly?”
This question he addressed to Paulina, as he sat down and placed her gently on the ground before him.
“How is Polly’s papa?” was the reply, as she leaned on his knee, and gazed up into his face.
It was not a noisy, not a wordy scene: for that I was thankful; but it was a scene of feeling too brimful, and which, because the cup did not foam up high or furiously overflow, only oppressed one the more. On all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain or ridicule comes to the weary spectator’s relief; whereas I have ever felt most burdensome that sort of sensibility which bends of its own will, a giant slave under the sway of good sense.
Mr. Home was a stern-featured — perhaps I should rather say, a hard-featured man: his forehead was knotty, and his cheekbones were marked and prominent. The character of his face was quite Scotch; but there was feeling in his eye, and emotion in his now agitated countenance. His northern accent in speaking harmonised with his physiognomy. He was at once proud-looking and homely-looking. He laid his hand on the child’s uplifted head. She said — “Kiss Polly.”
He kissed her. I wished she would utter some hysterical cry, so that I might get relief and be at ease. She made wonderfully little noise: she seemed to have got what she wanted — all she wanted, and to be in a trance of content. Neither in mien nor in features was this creature like her sire, and yet she was of his strain: her mind had been filled from his, as the cup from the flagon.
Indisputably, Mr. Home owned manly self-control, however he might secretly feel on some matters. “Polly,” he said, looking down on his little girl, “go into the hall; you will see papa’s greatcoat lying on a chair; put your hand into the pockets, you will find a pocket-handkerchief there; bring it to me.”
She obeyed; went and returned deftly and nimbly. He was talking to Mrs. Bretton when she came back, and she waited with the handkerchief in her hand. It was a picture, in its way, to see her, with her tiny stature, and trim, neat shape, standing at his knee. Seeing that he continued to talk, apparently unconscious of her return, she took his hand, opened the unresisting fingers, insinuated into them the handkerchief, and closed them upon it one by one. He still seemed not to see or to feel her; but by-and-by, he lifted her to his knee; she nestled against him, and though neither looked at nor spoke to the other for an hour following, I suppose both were satisfied.
During tea, the minute thing’s movements and behaviour gave, as usual, full occupation to the eye. First she directed Warren, as he placed the chairs.
“Put papa’s chair here, and mine near it, between papa and Mrs.
Bretton: I must hand his tea.”
She took her own seat, and beckoned with her hand to her father.
“Be near me, as if we were at home, papa.”
And again, as she intercepted his cup in passing, and would stir the sugar, and put in the cream herself, “I always did it for you at home; papa: nobody could do it as well, not even your own self.”
Throughout the meal she continued her attentions: rather absurd they were. The sugar-tongs were too wide for one of her hands, and she had to use both in wielding them; the weight of the silver cream-ewer, the bread-and-butter plates, the very cup and saucer, tasked her insufficient strength and dexterity; but she would lift this, hand that, and luckily contrived through it all to break nothing. Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busybody; but her father, blind like other parents, seemed perfectly content to let her wait on him, and even wonderfully soothed by her offices.
“She is my comfort!” he could not help saying to Mrs. Bretton. That lady had her own “comfort” and nonpareil on a much larger scale, and, for the moment, absent; so she sympathised with his foible.
This second “comfort” came on the stage in the course of the evening. I knew this day had been fixed for his return, and was aware that Mrs. Bretton had been expecting him through all its hours. We were seated round the fire, after tea, when Graham joined our circle: I should rather say, broke it up — for, of course, his arrival made a bustle; and then, as Mr. Graham was fasting, there was refreshment to be provided. He and Mr. Home met as old acquaintance; of the little girl he took no notice for a time.
His meal over, and numerous questions from his mother answered, he turned from the table to the hearth. Opposite where he had placed himself was seated Mr. Home, and at his elbow, the child. When I say child I use an inappropriate and undescriptive term — a term suggesting any picture rather than that of the demure little person in a mourning frock and white chemisette, that might just have fitted a good-sized doll — perched now on a high chair beside a stand, whereon was her toy workbox of white varnished wood, and holding in her hands a shred of a handkerchief, which she was professing to hem, and at which she bored perseveringly with a needle, that in her fingers seemed almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon — swerving from her control — inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly.
Graham was at that time a handsome, faithless-looking youth of sixteen. I say faithless-looking, not because he was really of a very perfidious disposition, but because the epithet strikes me as proper to describe the fair, Celtic (not Saxon) character of his good looks; his waved light auburn hair, his supple symmetry, his smile frequent, and destitute neither of fascination nor of subtlety (in no bad sense). A spoiled, whimsical boy he was in those days.
“Mother,” he said, after eyeing the little figure before him in silence for some time, and when the temporary absence of Mr. Home from the room relieved him from the half-laughing bashfulness, which was all he knew of timidity — -”Mother, I see a young lady in the present society to whom I have not been introduced.”
“Mr. Home’s little girl, I suppose you mean,” said his mother.
“Indeed, ma’am,” replied her son, “I consider your expression of the least ceremonious: Miss Home I should certainly have said, in venturing to speak of the gentlewoman to whom I allude.”
“Now, Graham, I will not have that child teased. Don’t flatter yourself that I shall suffer you to make her your butt.”
“Miss Home,” pursued Graham, undeterred by his mother’s remonstrance, “might I have the honour to introduce myself, since no one else seems willing to render you and me that service? Your slave, John Graham Bretton.”
She looked at him; he rose and bowed quite gravely. She deliberately put down thimble, scissors, work; descended with precaution from her perch, and curtsying with unspeakable seriousness, said, “How do you do?”
“I have the honour to be in fair health, only in some measure fatigued with a hurried journey. I hope, ma’am, I see you well?”
“Tor-rer-ably well,” was the ambitious reply of the little woman and she now essayed to regain her former elevation, but finding this could not be done without some climbing and straining — a sacrifice of decorum not to be thought of — and being utterly disdainful of aid in the presence of a strange young gentleman, she relinquished the high chair for a low stool: towards that low stool Graham drew in his chair.
“I hope, ma’am, the present residence, my mother’s house, appears to you a convenient place of abode?”
“Not par-tic-er-er-ly; I want to go home.”
“A natural and laudable desire, ma’am; but one which, notwithstanding,
I shall do my best to oppose. I reckon on being able to get out of you
a little of that precious commodity called amusement, which mamma and
Mistress Snowe there fail to yield me.”
“I shall have to go with papa soon: I shall not stay long at your mother’s.”
“Yes, yes; you will stay with me, I am sure. I have a pony on which you shall ride, and no end of books with pictures to show you.”
“Are you going to live here now?”
“I am. Does that please you? Do you like me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I think you queer.”
“My face, ma’am?”
“Your face and all about you: You have long red hair.”
“Auburn hair, if you please: mamma, calls it auburn, or golden, and so do all her friends. But even with my ‘long red hair’” (and he waved his mane with a sort of triumph — tawny he himself well knew that it was, and he was proud of the leonine hue), “I cannot possibly be queerer than is your ladyship.”
“You call me queer?”
“Certainly.”
(After a pause), “I think I shall go to bed.”
“A little thing like you ought to have been in bed many hours since; but you probably sat up in the expectation of seeing me?”
“No, indeed.”
“You certainly wished to enjoy the pleasure of my society. You knew I was coming home, and would wait to have a look at me.”
“I sat up for papa, and not for you.”
“Very good, Miss Home. I am going to be a favourite: preferred before papa soon, I daresay.”
She wished Mrs. Bretton and myself goodnight; she seemed hesitating whether Graham’s deserts entitled him to the same attention, when he caught her up with one hand, and with that one hand held her poised aloft above his head. She saw herself thus lifted up on high, in the glass over the fireplace. The suddenness, the freedom, the disrespect of the action were too much.
“For shame, Mr. Graham!” was her indignant cry, “put me down!” — and when again on her feet, “I wonder what you would think of me if I were to treat you in that way, lifting you with my hand” (raising that mighty member) “as Warren lifts the little cat.”
So saying, she departed.
Chapter III. The Playmates.
Mr. Home stayed two days. During his visit he could not be prevailed on to go out: he sat all day long by the fireside, sometimes silent, sometimes receiving and answering Mrs. Bretton’s chat, which was just of the proper sort for a man in his morbid mood[3] — not over-sympathetic, yet not too uncongenial, sensible; and even with a touch of the motherly — she was sufficiently his senior to be permitted this touch.
