Wonderful, Weird, Wuthering

Wuthering Heights has perplexed readers ever since it was first published in 1847. Justine Pizzo, lecturer at Southampton University, explored what it is about Emily Brontë’s novel that continues to puzzle readers today, in a talk to the Brussels Brontë Group on Saturday 14 October 2023. 

Special Copies of Villette, Part 1 – Lewis Carroll’s

In libraries in the United States a few copies of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette can be found that once belonged to equally renowned authors. The Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia for instance has one that was part of the collection of books of Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. He must have loved Villette. He had two copies of the novel!

When Charles was eleven years old his family moved from Cheshire to Yorkshire, where his father, a vicar too, got a new and better position. They lived in Croft-on-Tees, near Darlington, but it also brought them sometimes to the Cathedral of Ripon, not that far from Haworth. At home he, like the Brontës, wrote domestic magazines. In 1846 he went to Rugby School, where he spent three unhappy years, and then he went to Oxford. For the rest of his life Dodgson would live there at Christ Church College.

One of Dodgson's rooms at Christ Church, Oxford

Villette in Italy, translations and reprints

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has remained almost unknown for more than a century after its publication in Italy to most critics and writers. Its very first complete translation into Italian dates back to March 1962 when Rizzoli published the novel in B.U.R. (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli). It was translated by Marcella Hannau Pavolini, at the time a well-known translator of English and American novels never read till then in the Italian language. She was the poet Corrado Pavolini’s wife and was considered ‘a very intelligent woman.’ Her only Brontë translation was Villette which she entitled Collegio Femminile and it was unabridged since the whole text was reproduced, with the French sentences translated in notes and a short introduction by Mrs. Hannau Pavolini herself. This first Italian edition appeared in two little (16 cm) volumes for a total of 597 pages, with no picture on the cover (figs. 1 and 1a).

The cover of the 1962 Collegio Femminile, with and
without the dust wrappers

In the same year 1962 the second edition of an abridged version of the same novel entitled Miss Lucy (fig. 2) appeared for the publishing house Capitol, from Bologna, after a first edition from 1960 (522 pp.). It was translated by Valentina Bianconcini, who in those years was also the translator of other abridged teenager versions of the Brontë novels (1).

The cover of the 1960/1962 Miss Lucy

In 1996 a new unabridged Italian version of Charlotte Brontë’s last novel appeared with its original title, Villette, published by Fazi Editore and translated by Simone Caltabellota with a preface by Antonella Anedda (fig. 3). The translator, who at the time worked in the then almost unknown publishing house, is nowadays an Italian acclaimed editor and novelist but has never again translated other Brontë novels. In this translation however Charlotte’s French is not given in Italian. It has seen three reprints, the first in 2003 (a pocket edition, with a new cover) and the other two, in 2013 (634 pp) and 2014 (640 pp), with another new cover (fig. 4 and 5). The latter has been described in the Villette Cover top 6 article (as nr. 4).