Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette ” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette , written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

Matthew Heitzman, “‘He Resembled the Great Emperor’: Charlotte Brontë, Villette , and the Rise of Napoleon III” (pp. 199–223) This essay offers a local historical context for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), reading it in relation to the rise of Napoleon III as Emperor of France. Napoleon III completed his ascendancy just as Brontë was completing her novel. His rise prompted a mixture of anxiety and optimism in the English press, as English political commentators were uncertain if this new Napoleon’s reign would mark a return to the Anglo-French nationalist strife of the first Napoleonic period or if his rule would mark a détente and productive path forward for Anglo-French relations. I argue that this ambiguity is coded into Brontë’s characterization of Monsieur Paul Emanuel, and that we can read Monsieur Paul’s romance with Lucy Snowe as a political allegory—Brontë’s attempt to decipher what Napoleon III’s rapid rise meant for Anglo-French relations. I suggest in this essay that Brontë’s interest in the contemporary Anglo-French political context was a product of her fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte, specifically his rivalry with the Duke of Wellington, and that understanding her interest in the first Napoleonic period can help us to decipher why her depiction of Anglo-French nationalist interaction in Villette is totally at odds with her other novels, where French nationalism is typically a trait that needs to be effaced.

Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontëë's The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette ) as simply "not England." In contrast, this essay considers the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette , arguing that Belgium represents a crucial middle-ground between British and French values in the mid nineteenth century. Not only was Belgium the location of the decisive British victory over the French at Waterloo, but British commentators also increasingly depicted Belgium as a "little Britain on the continent," or potentially Anglicized space, in the 1840s. Drawing on both Brontëë's explicit references to the Napoleonic Wars in The Professor and Villette and contemporary Victorian conceptions of Belgium, this essay argues that Brontëë's use of this particular foreign space is not just a result of her experiences in Brussels in the early 1840s. Instead, the overlooked middle——ground of Belgium epitomizes the conflict between British and French values in Brontëë's fiction——and the possibility of their reconciliation. While Brontëë ultimately rejects the idea that Belgium represents the site of a possible Anglo-Continental union, it is nonetheless a space in which Brontëë's characters reformulate or consolidate their ideas of home, revealing Britishness to be both culturally produced and value-laden in Brontëë's fiction.