Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 21, 2025

Charlotte Brontë called on her own experience in writing her third novel, Villette. Like her other novels, this one contains various autobiographical aspects. Brontë had taught for a time in Brussels at the school of Monsieur and Madame Heger. She transforms Brussels into Villette, offering one of the most accurate and detailed portrayals of Belgian life in print. While she had published Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849) successfully, another novel, titled The Professor, had been rejected, although it would be published posthumously, and she based much of Villette on that manuscript.

The first-person narrator, Lucy Snowe, begins the novel in relative luxury, spending six months with her godmother, Mrs. Bretton, her son Graham Bretton, later called John, and a young boarder, Pauline (Polly) Home, whose father has temporarily left her in Mrs. Bretton’s care as he travels to America. When he later sends for Polly to join him, Lucy returns home following a six-month absence. She falls on hard times there and loses contact with the Brettons, who she learns had some ill fortune of their own.

Lucy represents many young women of Brontë’s era who, having been born to comfort, eventually found themselves in need of employment. Few opportunities for self-support existed for women, one of which was serving older women as companions, and Lucy chooses this route, going into the employ of the wealthy invalid Miss Marchmont. Lucy describes her world as “two hot, close rooms” and “a crippled old woman, my mistress, my friend, my all. Her service was my duty.” Thinking she might waste her life in this way for twenty years, she hears a howling wind one evening reminiscent of a banshee and recalls she has heard that wind prior to every great tragic change in her life. In a bittersweet death scene, Miss Marchmont reveals something of her love for her dead husband to Lucy and then leaves Lucy alone once again. Before relocating to London, Lucy overhears a friend from her past mention that many young women live abroad, and she stores away that information.

From London, Lucy travels by boat to Villette in the kingdom of Labassecour, meeting a passenger named Ginevra Fanshawe. Beautiful and egotistical, Ginevra is a student at a girls’ school in Villette operated by the headmistress Madame Beck. With Ginevra’s reluctant support, Lucy eventually wins Madame Beck’s favor, serving her children as a governess and later becoming a teacher in the school. There she meets again the son of her godmother, who she had known years before, Dr. John Bretton, as well as Paulina Home, who has returned from America. While Lucy develops feelings for John, he develops a crush on Ginevra.

Keeping secret her own emotions, she can only hope he eventually realizes Ginevra’s shortcomings. While John does reject Ginevra due to her vanity, he falls in love with his childhood friend Paulina.

Lucy once again faces isolation but slowly comes to appreciate a professor, Paul Emmanuel, whose fussy, critical personality had at first dismayed her. He is a cousin to Madame Beck, who does her best to prevent any relationship from developing, feeling Lucy beneath Paul’s social status. Once again Brontë emphasizes society’s misuse of vulnerable young women. Love triumphs, however, although Paul must depart at the novel’s conclusion for the West Indies, promising to return in three years and marry Lucy. Readers wonder whether the marriage ever occurs, as Brontë concludes her plot three years later with Paul’s return imminent. However, when Lucy again hears the keening of the wind, that seems to foreshadow disaster, particularly when she describes the aftermath of the seven-day storm: “the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks.”

While not widely read, Villette is studied in academic programs as an excellent example of Charlotte Brontë’s superb sense of place and atmosphere.

Bibliography

Lloyd Evans, Barbara, and Gareth Lloyd Evans. The Scribner Companion to the Brontës. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.
Winnifrith, Tom, and Edward Chitham. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Literary Lives. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1989.