ABOUT A YEAR ago I decided that it was wrong of me to have taught Jane Eyre several times without ever having read any of C.B.'s other novels, so I started this one.
Volume I was promising. Lucy Snowe (origins left unspecified) describes visiting the home of her godmother, Mrs. Bretton. Lucy seems a bit smitten with Mrs. Bretton's son, Graham, but before anything develops on that front she is off across the Channel to the city of Villette (a city much like Brussels) to teach English at a girls' boarding school. As we did with Jane, we see Lucy having to rely on her own wits and strength as she learns to manage the challenges of a new situation and the new people--some friendly, others not so--with whom she lives and works. One of the nicer ones is a young English doctor, known as Dr. John.
At the end of Volume I, Lucy faints, When she revives, in Volume II, she mysteriously finds herself among the furniture of her godmother. Turns out Mrs. Bretton has relocated to Villette. Hmm, bit contrived, but okay. Then it turns out that Dr. John is Graham. Whoa. Moreover, Lucy knew this the whole time but did not let us in on it.
I stopped reading at that point.
Not that I resolved never to finish the book. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and finished it. But I was just...dismayed. Lucy, Lucy! Why did you not tell us Dr. John was Graham as soon as you knew?
My dismay I attributed to the contrast with Jane Eyre. Jane sometimes can keep mum with the other characters in her novel--though her best moments are when she gives them a good clean blast of honesty--but she never conceals anything from us. We--that is, "reader"--are her best friend, her confidante, and we are regularly apostrophized, often at particularly intense moments. She tells us everything. Everything! How can we not love her?
Lucy tells us nothing. What became of your parents, Lucy? How did you get that gig in Belgium? How do you actually feel about Graham/Dr. John? About his entanglements with the spoiled rotten Ginevra Fanshawe, or the admirable but fragile-seeming Polly Bassompierre? About your teaching colleague Paul Emmanuel, about his being a devout Catholic, about his complicated circumstances? Are you even going to tell us whether he made it back from the Caribbean? (She is not.)
Jane is an open book, Lucy a locked box--harder to love, but eventually I did: tender here, flinty there, proud, principled, resilient, smart. But likes to keep her secrets.
And that scene where she walks around the night-time festival tripping on opium--best thing in all Brontë, to my mind.
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