nt to debase her and efface her. How then did it happen
that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?

It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Bronte
created a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too
strong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Bronte. From the moment when he
seized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte
Bronte had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utter
exclusion and extinction of Pauline de Bassompierre.

And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent that
Charlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out of
her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her
hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended him
for the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been very
gratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for her
purpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she is
consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsession
to her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy
Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and perfected to match
the high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr.
John "came off". Charlotte Bronte cared too much for them. But for Paul
Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached,
divinely free "Creative Impulse".

Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to her genius from
the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience
Brussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think,
can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anything
more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the most
intense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspired
by the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings the
stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there,
changed, intensified, transmuted to an experience and a suffering which
were not hers.

This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the drawing of the
minor characters. There is a certain vindictiveness about the portrait
of Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that
caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator.
Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourish