Lucasta Miller in The Guardian:
1 Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)
Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she goes back to the Brussels material that she had already used at a tangent in The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience of studying and teaching there in 1842-4. Reworking those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporated her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she had felt for her Belgian writing tutor Constantin Heger.
Yet the result is anything but naïve autobiography. Instead, it shows Charlotte push the classic realist Victorian novel in new, artistically experimental directions. The unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe, has intimacy issues and sets a challenge for the reader. Long before Freud, Charlotte was exploring questions about repression and the unconscious in a complex, self-knowing psychological novel whose generic status hovers ambiguously between naturalism, gothic and autofiction. The extent to which Villette mined and refracted her own inner life was only discovered posthumously by her biographers.
More here.
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