9) Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars

Enthused by my recent reading of Villette, I ordered this little book from the Brontë Society last week and it was waiting for me on my return from Moldova. I must be in the very small minority of readers who bought it more because of Brussels than the Brontës; in my last job, I often went for a sandwich lunch in the Parc de Bruxelles, and even now I find myself trying to thread my car through the relevant streets a couple of times each month as I head to the north of the city centre. Plus there is something very fascinating about vanished streetscapes; the school where Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived in 1842, and to which Charlotte returned alon for a year in January 1843, was demolished in 1909 as part of the development which has resulted in today's Palais des Beaux-Arts, built in the 1920s. As well as that, of course, the sense of place in Villette is so well developed that there is a certain fascination in reading more about the reality on which the fiction was based.

One does feel, however, for the unfortunate Hegers, who had taken the unattractive, reserved and disconcertingly intelligent Brontë girls under their wing for a few months as an act of kindness, and then found themselves and their country portrayed in Villette in a way they simply could not have anticipated. Ruijssenaars has attached to his own text a half-dozen glorious accounts from Brontë fans between 1871 and 1916 coming to gaze at the Pensionnat and its inhabitants, reverently plucking leaves from the pear-trees in the garden, and generally harassing the Hegers. That is not to minimise the interest of Ruijssenaars' own work, bringing together the archives and published architectural history of Brussels with the accumulated lore of a century and a half of Brontëology.

( pictures and maps )

I must admit that, time and ianmcdonald permitting, I would love to do a guide to the Belfast scenes of Sacrifice of Fools. (Isn't there a book somewhere out there about Philip K Dick's California?) If I could do half as well as this I'd be very pleased.

4) Villette, by Charlotte Brontë

With my ancestral home being near where the Brontë sisters' father was born, and having trudged through Jane Eyre for my O-level in English Literature (one of my two B grades, along with Religious Education), I have always had a vague interest in them. But this was the first Charlotte Brontë novel I have read as an adult (I did read Wuthering Heights a couple of years back, prompted by the BBC's Big Read).

Part of the attraction (apart from it being part of my Unread Books Project) is that Villette is Brussels, and the small largely Francophone kingdom of Labassecour (which still retains its impenetrable aboriginal dialect) is Belgium. There's not a lot of English-language fiction set in my adopted homeland. (Even less sf or fantasy.) The only other bit that leaps to mind is the couple of glimpses in Heart of Darkness. So it was interesting to read the book and try and match description to location. In fact, I have ordered a wee book called Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars, from the Brontë Society website, to slake my curiosity.

Having said all that, unfortunately Villette is not a very strong example of the sisters' genius. There are too many unlikely coincidences, and I was very uncomfortable with the way in which the narrator reacts to being emotionally abused by one of her axcquaintances by falling in love with him. It was not at all clear to me why she did not end up with the nice doctor chap. In addition, though this is supporting evidence rather than crucial, I don't think the book does well on the Bechdel Test. Anyway, interesting to see the Brussels of a century and a half ago through someone else's eyes.

The author of this quotation:

Belgium!  name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce.  Belgium!  I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

is in fact Charlotte Brontë - but not in Villette, where she refers to the country as "Labassecour" rather than Belgium, and the eponymous "Villette" is pretty obviously Brussels (the boarding school is on the site of what is now the Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten). However, in her earlier novel The Professor she uses much the same plot without bothering to change the names of the setting. I found the quote in Chapter 7, online here; it starts:

READER, perhaps you were never in Belgium?  Haply you don't know the physiognomy of the country?  You have not its lineaments defined upon your memory, as I have them on mine?

I'm half-way through Villette and enjoying it about as much as I enjoy any novel of that genre; have already survived the first of the notorious plot twists though I understand there were more to come.

Well done bopeepsheep and nearly to aliceinfinland for at least suggesting Charlotte Brontë; I have to say it doesn't sound to me like anything Douglas Adams would have written! (And perhaps in retrospect it isn't all that obvious even when you do know the answer.)

Actually the full list of books I own but haven't read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as "unread" by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

Some of these were reasonably high on the to-read pile; others will get promoted when I get back.