Romance Brontë, Charlotte: Villette. v3, 18 Sep 2016

[AlexBell]

Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, the third daughter of Revd Patrick and Maria Brontë. A son and two more daughters were born later. Mrs Brontë died in 1821. The two elder sisters died in 1825, her brother and a sister died in 1848, and her other sister died in 1849, all of tuberculosis. Her father died in 1861.

In 1824 she was sent to Cowan Bridge School with a younger sister to join her older sisters. After one died in 1825 they were sent home where the other soon died. The remaining four children remained at home until 1830 under the supervision of her mother's sister, and wrote many short stories and poems together for several years.

Charlotte went to Roe Head school early in 1831 and made two lifelong friends, and left in 1832. She returned to the school as a teacher in 1835 and left in 1838 to return home. She spent short periods as a governess, went to Mme Hegel's school in Brussels in 1842, and returned there as a teacher the next year. She seems to have become infatuated with M. Hegel, and wrote many intense letters to him after she returned home in 1844.

She wrote her first novel, The Professor, in 1846, which was published posthumously in 1857 after her husband had edited it. Jane Eyre was published in 1847 to instant acclaim, and despite being painfully shy she sought and gained the friendship of Harriet Martineau, William Thackeray, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Shirley was published in 1849, and Villette was published in 1853.

Having refused at least three earlier proposals of marriage from other men she accepted a proposal from her father's curate, married him in June 1854, and died during early pregnancy in March 1855.

Villette is the saddest book I have ever read, though George Eliot thought it 'a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre' and Virginia Woolf thought it Charlotte Brontë's finest novel. If there is a central theme it may be Miss Marchmont's words 'We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible. We should accept our own lot, whatever it be, and try to render happy that of others.'

The complex plot describes the loves and suffering of the emotionally crippled protagonist and those with whom she comes into contact as an adolescent in London and as a teacher at a girl's school in Brussels.

The text source cannot be identified because of the many corrections required, and was checked against the Penguin Classics edition. The text is replete with archaic and literary words which which have been left intact. There are many French words, sentences, and paragraphs, and English translations for most of them have been provided as 300 or so end notes. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, set letters off as blockquotes, and made changes to punctuation and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

Version 2 corrects many typos, improves the French translations with the help of a MobileRead member, uses diacritics in the metadata, adds more translations, and identifies some English words whose meaning is explained in the end notes.

Version 3 corrects some typos, adds more French translations and classical allusions, and improves the links to the translations.

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[AlexBell]

Version 2 corrects many typos, improves the French translations with the help of a MobileRead member, uses diacritics in the metadata, adds more translations, and identifies some English words whose meaning is explained in the end notes.

Please let me know if you find any more typos.

[AlexBell]

Version 3 correct some typos, adds more French translations and classical allusions, and improves the links to the translations.