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Photo: An illustration of Lucy Snowe by Edmund Dulac, found in the 1911 edition of Villette.

‘This nineteenth-century spinster is the future of British Quakerism.’

Plain to Quakerism: Jonathan Wooding on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

‘This nineteenth-century spinster is the future of British Quakerism.’

by Jonathan Wooding 19th September 2025

Charlotte Brontë knew a thing or two about keeping silence. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of her 1853 novel Villette, is an avatar of Brontë herself, and she presents silence as ‘indissoluble’ and capable of ‘baffling imagination’. 

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