She appears in many articles on this blog, as
both her novels and her life are of great interest and relevance. There were
innumerable articles and reviews and some biographies already in existence, but
I described some of the unseen influences I detected, producing some original
material.
To mark the occasion, here is a quotation
from Villette that I particularly like because it mentions London:
"I did well to come," I
said ... "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me.
Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his
faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?"
She also mentions St. Paul’s Cathedral in a
descriptive paragraph that reminds me of the essence of London near the river on
a fine spring morning:
“Prodigious was the amount of
life I lived that morning. Finding myself before St. Paul's, I went in; I
mounted to the dome: I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and
its churches; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple Gardens, with sun
upon them, and a glad, blue sky, of early spring above; and between them and
it, not too dense, a cloud of haze.”
St. Paul’s with Victorian visitors in 1848, a
year in which Charlotte and Anne Brontë visited London together:
