Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot had a similar quirk to their literary careers: after penning their respective masterpieces — Jane Eyre for Brontë in 1847, Middlemarch for Eliot in 1871 — both lived to publish deeply strange and religiously preoccupied novels a half-decade later. While the Jewish mysticism and Wagnerian scope of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda have prompted reams of scholarship, and its melodrama and finely-wrought heroine have broken through to popular consciousness, Brontë’s final published novel has met with relatively muted fanfare. Few beyond Brontë completists, academics, eccentrics, and those otherwise in-the-know seem to read Villette these days, let alone consider its aesthetic and ideological contours. Its heroine, Lucy Snowe, is criminally under-celebrated. The novel possesses a kind of secret-handshake status, seeming to subsist by virtue of the whispered interpersonal recommendation.
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