Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I AUTHORS, READERS, AND PUBLISHERS
- PART II WRITING VICTORIA’s ENGLAND
- PART III MODES OF WRITING
- PART IV MATTERS OF DEBATE
- PART V SPACES OF WRITING
- 27 Spaces of the nineteenth-century novel
- 28 National and regional literatures
- 29 Britain and Europe
- 30 Victorian empire
- 31 Writing about America
- PART VI VICTORIAN AFTERLIVES
- Select bibliography
- Index
29 - Britain and Europe
from PART V - SPACES OF WRITING
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I AUTHORS, READERS, AND PUBLISHERS
- PART II WRITING VICTORIA’s ENGLAND
- PART III MODES OF WRITING
- PART IV MATTERS OF DEBATE
- PART V SPACES OF WRITING
- 27 Spaces of the nineteenth-century novel
- 28 National and regional literatures
- 29 Britain and Europe
- 30 Victorian empire
- 31 Writing about America
- PART VI VICTORIAN AFTERLIVES
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Crossing the Channel for the first time, Lucy Snowe, the autobiographical voice of Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 Villette, beholds a vision:
In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide dreamland, far away. Sunshine lay on it, making the long coast one line of gold; tiniest tracery of clustered town and snow-gleaming tower, of woods deep-massed, of heights serrated, of smooth pasturage and veiny stream, embossed the metal-bright prospect. For background, spread a sky, solemn and dark-blue, and – grand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment – strode from north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.
Brontë’s description of Europe imagined, or seen, for the first time by a rootless, adventuresome British woman has often been taken as emblematic of the Victorian experience of the Continent: a quasi-Gothic, quasi-Romantic land offering pleasures both gemütlich and ‘imperial’, pleasures that promise a release from British social strictures. It accords well with our experience of a large number of Victorian writers, from the Brownings to George Meredith, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a few, for whom ‘Europe’ represented both inspiration and refuge, whether that Europe be Bohemian Paris or the Italy of the Risorgimento. The passage does not end on such a rainbow-tinged note, however. Characteristically, Lucy Snowe retracts: ‘Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader – or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral – an alliterative, text-hand copy – “Day-dreams are delusions of the demon.”
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- The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature , pp. 622 - 640Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012