Villette

And now the three years are past: M. Emanuel's return is fixed. It is Autumn; he is to be with me ere the mists of November come. My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care.

Lucy's journey from Bretton through Madame Beck's school to Paul Emanuel's departure and the awaited return forms a governess tragedy of repressed passion with deliberately unresolved closure, so plot scores 87.

As Madame Beck ruled by espionage, she of course had her staff of spies: she perfectly knew the quality of the tools she used, and while she would not scruple to handle the dirtiest for a dirty occasion—flinging this sort from her like refuse rind, after the orange has been duly squeezed.

Lucy, Paul Emanuel, Dr John, Madame Beck, and Paulina are typed but warmly individuated in Lucy's guarded narration without flattening into allegory only, so cast scores 88.

The next moment I sat in a cold, glittering salon, with porcelain stove, unlit, and gilded ornaments, and polished floor; and I waited, and waited, and waited.

Forty-two chapters of interior observation and school routine with the fête and storm as spikes amid the pensionnat's disciplined calm — rewarding but deliberately slow, so pace scores 80.

That storm roared frenzied, for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder.

Brontë's compressed psychological prose — Lucy's cold lucidity, the storm passages, Paul's letters — renders repression and longing with a density exceeding Jane Eyre's Gothic directness, so prose scores 92.

In this instance, stood for Villette—the great capital of the great kingdom of Labassecour. "Do you like Villette?" I asked. "Pretty well. The natives, you know, are intensely stupid and vulgar; but there are some nice English families."

Bretton, Villette, Madame Beck's pensionnat, and the Rue Fossette map Protestant England against Catholic Europe as a moral laboratory of surveillance and solitude, so world scores 86.

I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.

Ch.I's Lucy Snowe at Bretton and the arrival of Paulina establish the narrator's guarded temperament before Villette — inviting in restraint rather than shock, so hook scores 84.

As Madame Beck ruled by espionage, she of course had her staff of spies: she perfectly knew the quality of the tools she used, and while she would not scruple to handle the dirtiest for a dirty occasion—flinging this sort from her like refuse rind, after the orange has been duly squeezed.

Lucy's unreliable restraint, the ambiguous storm ending, and the governess's inner life without romantic resolution anticipate modernist psychological fiction and the anti-romance, so innov scores 89.

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return.

Paul Emanuel's letters, the awaited return, and the storm ending with "Here pause: pause at once" form among the most famous deliberately ambiguous endings in English fiction, so ending scores 90.