Studying English Literature in Context Critical Readings

A life writing focus enables dimensions of Charlotte Brontë’s ambitious and multifaceted exploration of the self in Villette, too easily overlooked when the novel is reductively categorised as autobiographical, to come into view. Although Brontë clearly drew on a range of actual experiences and real persons for Villette, her final novel demonstrates the extent to which her wide-ranging interest in complexities of self-understanding, self-presentation and concepts of personhood expand the remit of her fiction. Reading Villette alongside correspondence written by Charlotte Brontë reveals just how central feeling and emotion were to Brontë’s understanding of the truth claims of a work of art. This essay identifies loneliness and the corollary fear of being forgotten as linchpin emotions experienced by Charlotte Brontë (particularly at the time she drafted Villette) and vividly represented in her heroine Lucy Snowe’s narrative as she constructs what she refers to as a ‘book of life’. For both, letters function as life-sustaining ‘tokens’ of remembrance, tools with which to manage loneliness and counter the perceived threat of being forgotten. This emphasis in Villette is amplified through Brontë’s nuanced use of a rhetoric of writing more generally, which she invokes both to convey experiences of deeply knowing and being known by another and to anchor and make permanent the memories used to structure her narrative. She writes, in other words, ‘in characters of tint indelible’, as an expression of love, the emotion that Brontë herself posited as impervious to decay and a guarantor of immortality. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, relying heavily as it does on Brontë’s letters, extends an understanding of the relationship between life writing and legacy so richly examined in Villette.