‘In the dead of night I suddenly awoke’ – The Gothic Mode of ‘Villette’

Simon Marsden, a senior lecturer at Liverpool University and author of Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination, has in the past explored Gothic elements in Emily Brontë’s work rather than Charlotte’s. At the Brontë Society’s 2018 Emily Brontë conference to celebrate her bicentenary, he spoke on ‘Emily Brontë and Spectrality’. 

But for his Zoom talk to the Brussels Brontë Group on 16 March 2022, Simon turned to Charlotte Brontë and Villette, examining Gothic aspects of Charlotte’s last novel and the book’s relationship to early nineteenth-century Gothic literature.