An abundance of UK literary heritage: a Brussels angle on the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë, April 21 1816

In April 2016 we don’t just mark 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. It is also 200 years since the birth of the great English novelist, Charlotte Brontë.

I have long loved Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre,’ and visited the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire where she spent much of her life when I was a teenager. I did not, however, know her novel ‘Villette.’ I resolved to read it for the bicentenary, when the Brussels Brontë Group told me the plot centred on Brussels. Brontë studied French and taught English at a Brussels boarding school for girls in the 1840s. The school and surrounding area have since been redeveloped, but many other places remain which she knew well and which feature in Villette.

I began with low expectations. A colleague declared Villette: ‘the most boring book I have ever read!’ Another told me the personal unhappiness Charlotte experienced in Brussels meant she painted an unflattering portrait of the city and its inhabitants.

Reader, I could not put the book down! The heroine Lucy Snowe does indeed begin by being critical of Brussels. Then she starts to notice its many charms. She enjoys the galleries and museums, concerts and lectures – and of course the food. She describes with warmth walking outside Villette to the surrounding countryside. And she ends by falling in love with…… but I will not spoil the ending!

Villette is also full of reflections which continue to resonate today. Who can fail to recognise this description of the hopes and fears of starting a new enterprise?

“I enjoyed that day …..my fancy budded fresh and my heart basked in sunshine. These feelings, however, were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle. The breathing of that beast of prey was in my ear always; his fierce heart panted close against mine; he never stirred in his lair but I felt him: I knew he waited only till sundown to bound ravenous from his ambush.”

Or what about this on the fear of failure which often holds us back?

“…with my usual base habit of cowardice, I shrunk into my sloth, like a snail into its shell, and alleged incapacity and impracticability as a pretext to escape action. If left to myself, I should infallibly have let this chance slip.”

And I recognised my own experience in a passage on the battle in our minds between the often harsh realities laid out to us by Reason, and the hope and help lent to us by Imagination. It is too long to quote here – you will have to find chapter XXI and read it yourself!

Happy Birthday Charlotte Brontë !