Villette is Bronte’s final, most autobiographical and arguably most mature novel about Lucy Snowe, who lives without friends or family and sets sail from England to the town of Villette in Belgium to work at a girls’ boarding school.
Jane Eyre is child’s play compared to this, so I hope you’re ready for a Romantic, Gothic time with an OG Complicated Woman.
Week
Chapters
1-7 June
Chapters 1-9
8-14 June
Chapters 10-17
15-21 June
Chapters 18-25
22-28 June
Chapters 26-34
29 June-5 July
Chapters 35-42
Since a number of us felt the Wuthering Heights readalong dragged along a little and lost some momentum this will be quite an uptick in page count per week. I own a physical copy, which runs to approximately 590 pages of actual text, and I split the chapters as evenly as possible so we will read just over 100 pages per week. That’s around 20 pages per day, maybe a tad less, so I’m sure we’ve got this.
I read Jane Eyre as a silly 17-year-old boy for A-level English Lit and hated it so very much. Now I’m a touch older and a bit more mature I’d love to give Charlie B another whirl. Nice one
I did an English degree in York in the 90s and in the summer before I started I got a suggested reading list to wade through (I wonder if I still have it anywhere?)
It had ‘Villette’ at the top and said something like (and I’m only slightly paraphrasing): “This is the greatest novel ever written. It’s way better than Jane Eyre; the only reason why people think JE is better is because they’re cowards who are scared of a bit of French dialogue but don’t even think about starting this course without having read this book first you bunch of wet-under-the-ears losers”.
Do remember really enjoying it but I haven’t been back to it for 30 years since so I’m really interested to see what I make of it on a re-read (especially as I’ve taught JE a few times since).
“Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both." No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
Hang on. So I have to know French for some of this? Or can I, as I always do with any language insert, simply ignore it entirely and presume if it was an important sentence they’d have written it in the predominant language of the rest of the book?
Apparently. I may just give up. Footnotes are pure shit on Kindle at the best of times and a 50p bookn(or whatever) tends not to be the best of times. We’ll see.
There’s some French dialogue in the second half iirc but it’s still an English book in English almost the whole time.
@1101010 yeah Kindle books can be a pain for this sometimes, always seems to depend on whether they appear at the bottom of the screen or not, you might get lucky, or you might well be able to pick up a paper copy for 50p in a second hand bookshop or something.
Thank you for arranging.