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The Affective World of Charlotte Bronte's Villette.

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20000922
Author:HUGHES, JOHN

Matthew Arnold's comment that Villette was a "disagreeable" novel was, nonetheless, a testimony to the text's extraordinary emotional power, a feature that drew a different kind of evaluation from George Eliot, who wrote with astonishment that "I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power." [1] This article is an attempt to give an account of the distinctive affective world into which the reader is introduced in Villette; it is also ...

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