Reading Order
VilletteCharlotte Brontë Novels Reading Order
Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) is widely considered her finest novel, though it is less frequently read than Jane Eyre — a deeply psychological, partly autobiographical work about Lucy Snowe, an Englishwoman who takes a teaching position in a Belgian school in the fictional city of Villette (based on Brussels), where she falls in love with the volatile professor Paul Emanuel. The novel is more formally experimental than Jane Eyre, more psychologically complex, and more ambiguous in its ending.
Where to start
Villette
Complete Villette Book List
- 1Buy
Villette
Charlotte Brontë·1853·The novel — Brontë's most technically ambitious work; the unreliable narrator Lucy Snowe is one of the most carefully constructed in Victorian fiction; the novel's Gothic elements (the nun's ghost, the midnight garden scene) and its psychological acuity place it between Victorian fiction and modernism; the ending is deliberately ambiguous. - 2Buy
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë·1847·Brontë's first and most famous novel — the essential companion to Villette and typically read first; Jane Eyre shares Lucy Snowe's independence and moral seriousness but is presented in a more conventionally satisfying romantic plot; reading Jane Eyre before Villette gives the clearest picture of Brontë's development as a novelist. - 3Buy
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë·1857·Brontë's first novel (written before Jane Eyre but published posthumously) — set in the same Belgian school world as Villette, and the source from which Villette grew; in many ways inferior to both Jane Eyre and Villette, but essential for understanding how Brontë transformed her Brussels experiences across two novels. - 4Buy
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë·1847·Emily Brontë's novel is the other great 1847 novel alongside Jane Eyre — structured as a frame narrative about Heathcliff and Catherine's destructive passion; tonally and formally very different from Charlotte's novels but essential for understanding the Brontë sisters as a literary phenomenon. - 5Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·Woolf's novel is partly in dialogue with Villette — Woolf wrote extensively about the Brontës and recognized Charlotte as a precursor to the interior consciousness that modernism would develop; reading Villette alongside Mrs Dalloway shows the direct line from Brontë's psychological depth to Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique. - 6Buy
The Awakening
Kate Chopin·1899·Chopin's novel about a woman's awakening to desires that her social world cannot accommodate — the American contemporary of the Brontë sisters' portrait of female interiority, desire, and constraint; shares Villette's psychological acuity in depicting a woman's inner life against a world that refuses to acknowledge that inner life has value. - 7Buy
Possession
A.S. Byatt·1990·Byatt's novel about two contemporary academics who discover a correspondence between two Victorian poets — deeply engaged with the Brontë literary tradition and the question of how Victorian women writers' inner lives were suppressed and recovered; the contemporary novel most explicitly in dialogue with the Villette tradition.
Villette — Frequently Asked Questions
Should I read Jane Eyre or Villette first?
Jane Eyre should almost certainly be read first — it is more accessible, has a more conventionally satisfying plot, and established the conventions that Villette deliberately complicates. Jane Eyre is also Charlotte Brontë's most famous novel for good reason: its first-person voice, its Gothic atmosphere, and its romance plot are all better handled than in any preceding English novel. Villette is the more artistically ambitious work — the psychology is deeper, the form more innovative, and the ending more ambiguous — but its rewards are most fully available to readers who can compare it with its more accessible predecessor.
What is the ending of Villette?
The ending is famously ambiguous: Paul Emanuel, who has promised to return to Lucy from Guadeloupe, is sailing back when a terrible storm destroys ships at sea. The narrator Lucy refuses to say explicitly whether Paul survived or drowned, offering instead an extended passage about the storm's violence and telling the reader to imagine Paul returning safely if they prefer. Charlotte Brontë deliberately chose the ambiguity, reportedly over her father's objections; the surviving letters show that she knew she was writing against the convention that heroines are rewarded with love, and chose to leave the reader — like Lucy Snowe — in a state of uncertainty that is itself the novel's argument about women's lives.
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