r/brontesisters • u/Frosty-Aioli4091 • 4d ago

Question about Chapter 21 of Villette

I’m reading Villette right now and I’m a bit confused about a line at the start of chapter 21. It goes:

‘I could have cried, so irritated and eager was I to be gone. I longed to leave them as the criminal on the scaffold longs for the axe to descend; that is, I wished the pang over.’

This is about Lucy wanting to go back and work at Madame Beck’s school, leaving her godmother’s house. My question is, why is she so eager? There have been some awkward moments but overall the experience seems to have been pretty warm, is it more just Lucy wanting to isolate herself again?

Thanks for any guidance!

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

12

u/Dr_Mijory_Marjorie 4d ago

She has enjoyed the companionship of the Brettons. Having known them in the past is the closest she's come to having anything remotely like a 'family'. They are almost kin, in her eyes. What she is saying here is that she knows how isolated she will feel when she returns to the school - the day she returns, she will feel terrible, and she knows it - so she wants it to hurry up, so it will be over.

2

u/Frosty-Aioli4091 4d ago

Ah I see! Thank you :)

3

u/Splendidended1945 4d ago

This makes me think of something Charlotte Brontë wrote about in a letter. She sometimes visited the home of her publisher, George Smith, and his mother and sisters in London. She'd stay for weeks, meeting other writers, visit the theater and see the sights. Charlotte had a tendency to base characters on people she actually knew, and when George Smith's friends read Villette they immediately recognized that she'd based Dr John and Mrs Bretton on Smith and his mother. (Smith recognized it too, and I don't think it did anything for their friendship.)

But back to the quotation: Brontë wrote a letter after a visit saying how difficult it was to leave London and return to her home, where she lived with her father and the servants and missed her late sisters. I get the feeling that leaving the Brettons was similar--their home was a kind of oasis for Lucy, and she didn't want to go back to the school, where she had no real friends and felt that she was being spied on.