Abstract
I began this study by invoking the mighty blasts of wind which Charlotte Brontë recorded in her journal before she began a career as a novelist. That storm aroused what she called a ‘craving vacancy’, a desire and an awareness of absence which could then only be ‘filled a little’ by her waking dreams. The image of the wild storm reappears at the conclusion of her final work, Villette, rising, swelling, ‘shriek[ing] out long’ (p. 450). This time, however, that blast cannot be lulled’ — only ignored by a ‘sunny imagination’. The ‘dream’ of her adolescent journal had become a novel which gives a voice to desire in its multiple forms, but particularly that desire which emerges as a dream of sexual love.
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Notes
T. Wise and J.A. Symington, eds., Miscellaneous and Unpublished Works of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1934), III, p. 208, Letter of 11 February 1851.
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Dent, 1971), p. 382.
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© 1997 Susan Ostrov Weisser
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Weisser, S.O. (1997). Conclusion. In: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740–1880. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377349_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377349_8
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