What shall I do without you? How long are we likely to be separated? Why are we to be denied each other's society- I long to be with you. Why are we to be divided? Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well- [58]

Figuratively, Lucy hides herself in the shadows, content to stay hidden and keep her true, inner self from others and even partly from herself. She does not even truly open herself to us, her readers. Villette,” says Mrs. Gaskell, “was received with one burst of acclamation.” There was no question then among “the judicious,” and there can be still less question now, that it is the writer’s masterpiece. It has never been so widely read as Jane Eyre; and probably the majority of English readers prefer Shirley. Those veiled and agonized passages of Shirley are all that she will tell the world of woes that are not wholly her own. But of her personal suffering, physical and mental, she is mistress, and she has turned it to poignant and lasting profit in the misery of Lucy Snowe. The publication of Gaskell’s bestselling biography just two years after Brontë’s death in 1855 at last revealed the author’s name and sex to the public, and told the riveting story of her struggle, with her sisters Emily and Anne, to become a writer, the siblings’ isolated lives in their remote Yorkshire home and their tragic early deaths. The burgeoning cult of “the Brontës” raised the stakes of the guessing game about how closely their novels reflected life, leading to a bizarre situation when the owners of the school in Lancashire that the girls had attended became so annoyed about its identification with spartan Lowood in Jane Eyre that they threatened legal action for defamation – against a novel. The Professor, written before Jane Eyre, was first submitted together with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. Subsequently, The Professor was resubmitted separately, and rejectMrs. Smith, Mr. George Smith’s mother, was even more closely drawn—sometimes to words and phrases which are still remembered—in the Mrs. Bretton of the book.

From beginning to end it seems to be written in flame; one can only return to the metaphor, for there is no other that renders the main, the predominant impression. The story is, as it were, upborne by something lambent and rushing. M. Paul and Lucy fall in love, but she is not a Catholic, and the decision has already been made for him to leave. Before he goes he is very mysterious and does not see Lucy until the night before his departure. He has procured a house for her to set up a new school so that she may be independent and wait for him to return from Guadalupe. They exchange pledges of love, and M. Paul leaves. On the other hand, English novels by men—with the great exceptions of Richardson in the last century, and George Meredith in this, from Fielding and Scott onwards, are not, as a rule, studies of love. They are rather studies of manners, politics, adventure. The rival lamps were dying: she held her course like a white fate. Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangour, and were forgotten; with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven and on earth records for archives everlasting.”

Lucy Snowe: A woman of storm and shadow

Tales of Angria (written 1838–1839 – a collection of childhood and young adult writings including five short novels) My expectations, however, are very subdued—very different, I dare say, to what yourswere before you were married. Care and Fear stand so close to Hope, I sometimes scarcely can see her for the shadow they cast. And yet I am thankful too, and the doubtful future must be left with Providence. Yet the whole picture of his second love—the subduing of the strong successful man to modesty and tremor by the sudden rise of true passion, by the gentle, all-conquering approach of the innocent and delicate Paulina—is most subtly felt, and rendered with the strokes, light and sweet and laughing, that belong to the subject.