Villette (novel)
After an unspecified family disaster, the protagonist Lucy Snowe travels from her native England to the fictional Continental city of Villette to teach at a girls' school, where she is drawn into adventure and romance.It was preceded in writing by The Professor (her posthumously published first novel, of which Villette is a reworking, though still not very similar), Jane Eyre, and Shirley.He is kind and magnanimous, as is shown by his supporting and sheltering the elderly grandmother of his dead fiancée, Justine Marie, together with his former tutor (Père Silas) and a servant.As he grows closer to Lucy and falls in love with her everyone in his life attempts to keep them apart, and he is eventually banished to a family-owned plantation in Guadeloupe for three years.Ginevra thinks of Lucy as "caustic, ironic, and cynical," calling her "old lady," "dear crosspatch," and most frequently "Timon" (after a Greek misanthrope who lived during the 5th century BC).Ginevra Fanshawe states "Colonel de Hamal is a gentleman of excellent connections, perfect manners, sweet appearance, with pale interesting face, and hair and eyes like an Italian.Lucy further describes her as "wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate — withal perfectly decorous — what more could be desired?"Polly's mother, who neglected her daughter, has recently died and her father is recommended by doctors to travel to improve his spirits.On the ship, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, who tells Lucy that the directress of her boarding school for girls (based upon the Hégers' Brussels pensionnat) she is attending, Madame Beck, needs a bonne for her children."Dr. John," a handsome English doctor, frequently visits the school at the behest of Madame Beck, and deepens his affection for the coquette Ginevra Fanshawe.After the disabled child is fetched away, Lucy is extremely lonely and becomes both mentally and physically ill. She goes to a Catholic church (despite being a Protestant) to confess to a priest.After Dr. John (i.e., Graham) discovers Ginevra's true character while at the theatre, he turns his attention to Lucy, and they become close friends.However, a group of conspiring antagonists, including Madame Beck, the priest Père Silas, and the relatives of M. Paul's long-dead fiancée, work to keep the two apart, on the grounds that a union between a Catholic and a Protestant is impossible.He nonetheless declares his love for Lucy before his departure and arranges for her to live independently as the headmistress of her own day school, which she later expands into a pensionnat.Ginevra keeps in contact with Lucy through letters that show the young coquette has not changed and expects to live off of her uncle's (Basompierre's) good graces.Although Lucy says that she wants to leave the reader free to imagine a happy ending, she hints strongly that M. Paul's ship was destroyed by a storm during his return journey from the West Indies.The novel, in a gothic setting, simultaneously explores themes of isolation, doubling, displacement and subversion, and each of their impacts upon the protagonist's psyche.[further explanation needed] Some critics have explored the issues of Lucy's psychological state in terms of what they call "patriarchal constructs" which form her cultural context."—George Henry Lewes[citation needed] Virginia Woolf claims that Villette is Charlotte Brontë's "finest novel," and highlights its evocative descriptions of the natural world as a reflection of the main character's state of mind.[5] The Daily Telegraph's Lucy Hughes-Hallett argues that Villette is greater than Brontë's most famous work, Jane Eyre.She states that the novel is "an astonishing piece of writing, a book in which phantasmagorical set pieces alternate with passages of minute psychological exploration, and in which Brontë’s marvellously flexible prose veers between sardonic wit and stream-of-consciousness, in which the syntax bends and flows and threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire.".[6] Claire Fallon of The Huffington Post notes that Villette shares many themes with Brontë's previous works such as Jane Eyre yet highlights the dichotomy between the two novels' protagonists.Where Jane’s specialness is stipulated, despite her poverty and plain looks, the heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe, is an unassuming figure who spends the majority of the novel as a quiet observer.[8] In 1970, the BBC produced a television miniseries based on Villette, directed by Moira Armstrong and written by Lennox Phillips.It starred Judy Parfitt as Lucy Snowe, Bryan Marshall as Dr. John Graham Bretton, Peter Jeffrey as Paul Emanuel, and Mona Bruce as Madame Beck.[10] It was broadcast in February 1999 with Catherine McCormack as Lucy Snowe, Joseph Fiennes as Dr. Graham Bretton, Harriet Walter as Mme.[11] In August 2009, the novel was adapted as a two-week-long serial by Rachel Joyce for BBC Radio 4,[12] directed by Tracey Neale and with Anna Maxwell Martin as Lucy Snowe.