Category Archives: 2024

In 2023, I decided to finish reading all of the novels by the Brontë sisters. My daughter and I sometimes read classics together, and we read Jane Eyre (a reread for me), Wuthering Heights (also a reread for me) and Tenant of Wildfell Hall (not a reread for me). Years ago, I read the other novel by Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey.

After finishing Tenant, I decided that it would be a good year to finish reading the remaining 3 books by the Charlotte Brontë: The Professor, Shirley and Villette. My goal was to finish them by the end of the year. I finished the last page of Villette on New Years Eve. I can now provide my definitive ranking of the Brontë canon:

1. Jane Eyre (will always be my favorite) by Charlotte
2. Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne
3. Villette by Charlotte
4. Wuthering Heights (I have a love/hate relationship with this book) by Emily
5. Shirley by Charlotte
6. Agnes Grey by Anne
7. The Professor by Charlotte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Bronte
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1848
Genre: classic
Pages: 524
ReRead?: No
Project: classics club round 2

'She looked so like herself that I knew not how to bear it'

In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a 'wicked woman' as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son.

Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Bronte wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption, but scandalized readers of the time.

This is my second favorite Brontë novel. It starts with a letter from Gilbert Markham to a friend, about the mysterious Helen Graham, who has moved into Wildfell Hall after leaving her abusive husband. She, and her son, are living there in secret. The story develops with Gilbert falling in love with Mrs. Graham and generally being an irritating hanger-on.

Helen is an interesting character. She can be tiresome and preachy while also be representative of something very new and different – a woman with backbone enough to leave her abusive, alcoholic husband. The connection between Arthur, Helen’s husband, and Branwell Brontë, Anne’s ne’er do well, underachieving, self-indulgent alcoholic brother is very obvious. And, as art imitates life, Branwell died a rather terrible death as a result of his self-indulgence.

I’ve read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights many times. Tenant of Wildfell Hall will definitely become a book that I reread in similar fashion.

Villette
by Charlotte Bronte
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1853
Genre: classic
Pages: 611
ReRead?: No

Villette is Charlotte Brontë's powerful autobiographical novel of one woman's search for true love, edited with an introduction by Helen M. Cooper in Penguin Classics.

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There, she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings - first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë'sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

Villette was the last of the Brontë novels that I read, and is my third favorite. Until I read the book, I thought that Villette was a person, not a place, so I was surprised to figure out that Villette is a stand-in for Brussels, a city where Charlotte spent a year or two when she was young(er). Charlotte is the longest lived of the three sisters – she made it all the way to age 39. Anne died at 29, Emily at 30.

I really liked the main character of Villette, Lucy Snowe, maybe even best of all of the Brontë women. She’s occasionally overbearing in her martyrdom, but she is also fighting tooth and nail to establish her independence. She is a woman of no resources who ends up being extraordinarily resourceful. She can be difficult to like, but real women can also be difficult to like – especially the ones who are ahead of their time.

I have mixed feelings about the ambiguous ending of Villette – part of me would have preferred a more certain resolution. But, I don’t like the ending that Charlotte had intended for Lucy, so I’m happier with an ending where I can project my need for a positive conclusion onto the book. I will reread this book at some point.

Shirley
by Charlotte Bronte
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1849
Genre: classic
Pages: 624
ReRead?: No

Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning." Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.

A work that combines social commentary with the more private preoccupations of Jane Eyre, Shirley demonstrates the full range of Brontë's literary talent. "Shirley is a revolutionary novel," wrote Brontë biographer Lyndall Gordon. "Shirley follows Jane Eyre as a new exemplar but so much a forerunner of the feminist of the later twentieth century that it is hard to believe in her actual existence in 1811-12. She is a theoretic possibility: what a woman might be if she combined independence and means of her own with intellect. Charlotte Brontë imagined a new form of power, equal to that of men, in a confident young woman [whose] extraordinary freedom has accustomed her to think for herself....Shirley [is] Brontë's most feminist novel."

For me, Shirley suffers from covering some of the same ground as Elizabeth Gaskell’s more “socially conscious” fiction, such as North and South and, especially, Mary Barton. Set during, and concerning, the Luddite Revolt in the industrialized north of England, the concerns of the working poor are not a natural fit for Charlotte, who seems to have pretty well internalized an acceptance of the hierarchy (which kills off all of her siblings) in which she lives, and who is better with melodrama and gothic stylings. She is no firebrand for the plight of the working man.

This book claims, early on, that it is not a romance, but it is a marriage plot in the way of Trollope. The two main female characters: Caroline and Shirley, are both unmarried and both are married by the end of the book. The two primary “romantic” leads, while not particularly heroic in the romance sense, are pretty obvious from the beginning.

Having said that, I enjoyed both Caroline and Shirley, even if I am entirely lukewarm on the men they married. I may reread this book at some point.

The Professor
by Charlotte Bronte
Rating: ★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1857
Genre: classic
Pages: 316
ReRead?: No

"The middle and latter portion of The Professor is as good as I can write. It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre ." - Charlotte Brontë

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Brontë's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Brontë's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Brontë's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.

The Professor was Charlotte’s first book, but was rejected a number of times and was not published until after her death. It’s sort of a first draft of Villette, but with a different narrator. It’s the only of Charlotte’s books that is told from the perspective a man, which is just not convincing. I’m glad that I read it, in order to be a Brontë completist, but I will never reread this book.

So, there you have it. A very longwinded (like Charlotte!) post about finishing up the novels of the Brontë sisters.