I started reading this as it’s recommended in Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own. In my brief acquaintance with Woolf’s work, I find her style of prose in fiction to be too busy and a bit haphazard. Charlotte Bronte’s is much worse! I would describe it as grandiloquent, verbose and florid. Bronte will never use one word where she can use sixteen; or even sixty! Equally, a point is never made once if it can be made five or ten times in succession using evermore high-falutin metaphors and analogies. Reams of text are dedicated to the most trifling matters and the overall effect of this fussy, busy and loquacious style is boredom; often to the point of confusion. I was almost lulled to sleep by the neverending reiterations of the same point and seemingly endless, meandering descriptions of the most mundane scenes. The combination of extremely over elaborate prose and highly ponderous narrative development is especially displeasing.
Things start out well enough with a nice scene of domesticity at the Bretton’s house where Lucy Snowe, our ‘heroine’ is staying with her godmother. Polly, the tiny, precocious infant who arrives there is engaging and the scenes between her and Graham Bretton, the son of Mrs Bretton, are quite well presented. Lucy, who is the victim of some unexplained misfortune that has left her with no family, moves on quickly. Her new position is helping an invalided woman who dies quite soon after her appointment. From there, she moves to France and chances upon a position teaching at a school. At this point, the book really started to deteriorate for me. Not only does the narrative cease to have a relatively brisk pace; the developments that do take place are thoroughly inane. It’s as if someone has challenged Bronte to write the remainder of the story only involving characters she has already introduced. This is a really shitty and facile narrative device but Bronte never seems to tire of it; even though I found it exasperating as a reader. For example, there is is a young English doctor who helps Lucy with her case at the port in France. This doctor not only turns out to visit regularly at the school where she gets a job but also to be the very same Graham Bretton that she stayed with at the books inception. How the two could not recognise each other is inconceivable. It’s also unimaginable to me that a godmother of an orphan could be close enough to have her to stay at her house for a prolonged period but never write to her subsequently to find out how she is. Given that Mrs Bretton seems to like Lucy a lot and is highly attentive to her, both before and after the inexplicable break in communication, why would she let it happen in the first place? Worse still, the eventual reacquaintance is made when Lucy passes out from exhaustion on the street and is found by none other than Graham Bretton who takes her to the Bretton’s new house in Villette, France where they have moved. Of course, she also falls in love with him, abortively, before Graham is reunited with Polly via the chance circumstance of a fire a theatre where both happen to be watching a play. I won’t go on to detail the numerous other incidents in the plot where the reader’s credulity is stretched to breaking point. Suffice to say Bronte either has an intense belief in serendipity or thinks all her readership are credulous halfwits. None of it is even remotely believable and the majority of it is asinine!
Lucy starts off as a resourceful and plucky woman. She is forced into self-sufficiency but seems to be making an excellent fist of it. I hoped it was going to be a proto-feminist novel with Lucy as a capable, feisty superwoman. Sadly, she is soon going weak at the knees for letters from Graham Bretton, indulging in pathetic sycophancy towards anyone that could be considered of higher society and giving untold attention to the most frivolous and inconsequential matters. The fete held at the school in honour of Madame Beck, the proprietress, is an excellent example of how boring both the book and Lucy have become. The only thing that seems to happen is that there is a play and one of the actresses is taken ill so Lucy has to step in. She acts alongside another pupil, Ginevra, who is 1) Lucy’s cabin mate on the boat to France 2) a pupil at the school 3) a sometime rival for Graham’s affection 4) Polly’s cousin and 5) a ward of Polly’s father. This gives only a brief glimpse of the soap opera style plot that one has to contend with in attempting to read this book. Suffice to say, the play acts as a metaphor for the two ladies’ competing affections for Graham and everything is sentimentalised to a feverous pitch. The two women are said to “transfigure the script” but don’t change any of the words. Everything is conveyed with glances, flushes, quickening heartbeats; all of which struck me as meaningless nonsense. Lucy’s character never recovers from this demise and nor does the book. Sadly, the reader is subjected to an almost identical scene at a society ball where nothing really happens except for two or three glances and about 50 pages of ponderous, florid prose reinterpreting these looks and reiterating these interpretations until I was almost asleep.
Lucy is not a believable character at all. Not only does she change from being adventurous and full of life to being a dullard. She also falls in love with Graham but then doesn’t really care when he passes her over for Polly, which is totally unrealistic. She does nothing about her love for Graham, doesn’t care when he loses interest, doesn’t pursue anyone else and eventually ends up with M. Paul from the school who she spends most of the book criticising and seems to have no interest in until the very end. It is as if Bronte were just making it up as she went along. The plot is boring and ridiculously uninventive and Lucy’s character is confused and unbelievable.
To compound my extreme annoyance with this book, Bronte sometimes writes in French when reporting speech from the French characters, but not all the time. I suppose it doesn’t matter a great deal as everything is always repeated several times so I doubt I missed much. However, I do feel like the present publisher should have at least footnoted the, not inconsiderable, amount of foreign speech in this book. Bronte also likes to use quotation marks for what should ordinarily be first person speech but delivers in the third person, past tense. This is the first time I have ever seen this and, “he found it incomprehensible, he could not understand the purpose of this device; he wondered why it wasn’t just written in the first person, present tense like normal speech or written in the third person, past tense without the quotation marks, for goodness sake?!” I found it contrived and it added nothing to what was already a deeply frustrating book stylistically.
I won’t write anymore about this book except to say that it has very few merits and that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
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