Villette

[KEV67]

I have just finished chapter 7. It is not bad actually. I have heard it is based on the author's unrequited love for a professor in Belgium. The first few chapters are a foreshadowing of that. Then the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, decides to travel abroad on her own to find work. I think she has £15 with her. I thought that was bold. I multiply Victorian money by 100x to get an idea how much it would be today. Maybe 200x would be a better multiplier after the last few years' inflation. £1500 would not last that long. 

 

I read Jane Eyre at school for O level, when I did not like it. 1) it is romantic fiction for girls; 2) it is a Victorian doorstep. That makes it double girly. I read it later, when I liked it more, but I still thought bits of it were rubbish. I have also read Shirley, which is one of very few Victorian 'Factory' novels. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote two, Charles Dickens, one and Shirley was the other. I did not like it very much. It did not have a central theme. It meandered here and there. Charlotte Bronte had suffered the loss of her brother and at least one sister by then, and I do not think she was in top form. So far, Villette is a bit tighter. I am rooting for Lucy Snowe, although I hear things do not work out.

[Madeleine]

I read this years ago and can't remember much about it, but yes it is meant to be partly autobiographical.  I loved Jane Eyre which I also did for O level, I re-read it about 10 or so years ago and did find it very wordy, but I think that was a thing with Victorian novelists.  Overall I think it's still a stunning book, when it works well but yes it could have done with a bit of editing!

[KEV67]

Interesting teaching style Lucy Snowe develops. I assume it was a similar style to Charlotte Bronte's. Class sizes were pretty big,60 pupils. Being thrown in the deep end with no training or any time to develop lesson plans would not be easy neither. Lucy Snowe's strategy is to take down the trouble makers and queen bees. 

[KEV67]

The book has bogged down a bit. I am still in Volume 1 and Lucy Snowe is still teaching at a school in Villette. I suppose there is a lot of Charlotte Bronte in her heroine. I have thought this before, but I do not think I would have liked Charlotte Bronte as a person. She rides a high horse and is pretty judgemental about folks she does not like, which is most of them.

[KEV67]

Poor Lucy Snowe. She fancies Dr Graham, but Dr Graham fancies other birds. OTOH M. Paul seems to fancy Lucy Snowe, and in his own way is as find a chap as Dr Graham.  I am still only half way through this book, but my advice to Lucy Snowe is to give up Dr Graham and give M. Paul a chance.

[KEV67]

I did not like the ending. I do not like sad endings, generally. In the notes to the last chapter, it said that Patrick Bronte did not like the ending either, so Charlotte Bronte changed it to make it ambiguous. Charles Dickens did something similar for Great Expectations. He wrote a first ending, which many people prefer, but which is sad and bitter. His girlfriend and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, most famous for coining "The pen is mightier than the sword," did not like it. So Dickens changed the final chapter for one that was much more ambiguous. I did not think the ending to Villette was as good as the ambiguous ending to Great Expectations.

I watched a YouTube video of an American professor of literature. He said Victorian books had crummy endings. For example, he said Anna Karenina went wrong after the death of a principal character in the last part of the book. That did make me wonder. The only Victorian book that I thought had a really good ending was Wuthering Heights. I thought Moby Dick had a pretty good ending too. I read somewhere Herman Melville added a short chapter to the ending, but only to explain an inconsistency in the story.

In one of David Lodge's campus trilogy books, I think Small World, an academic started reading an old book in preparation for a creative writing class. I was struck by the advice. It said there were three types of ending: a happy ending, a sad ending and a neither-nor ending. He advised most writers opt for happy endings, and that only a genius should attempt a neither-nor ending. That sounds like good advice to me. I thought the ending of Captain Correlli's Mandolin was spoilt by the neither-nor ending. I can see that Louis de Berniers did not want a happy ending, because that would have been too pat and not dramatic enough. He did not want an unhappy ending, because that would have been too bleak. So he went for the unhappy but happy ending, because that had a bit of a twist and some drama. 

[Madeleine]

So many books are let down by the ending, I'm looking at "Cold Mountain" as one example.  I know lots of people who have a big dent in a wall due to that ending!