ABSTRACT
Summing up many readers’ sense of the essential strangeness of Charlotte Brontë's work, Heather Glen characterizes her writing as being “curiously unsettling to read,” a description that is especially appropriate to Villette.1 Brontë’s final novel is distinguished by an unabashedly unobjective and often unpleasant narrator as well as a curious disjunction between the placid, comfortable external world of Villette and the tortured, yearning inner world of Lucy Snowe. Perhaps most unsettling for the twenty-first-century reader is that Charlotte Brontë creates, through these very eccentricities and disjunctions, an unexpectedly modern protagonist and fictional world.
