Living Room Literature is a curious initiative which is in the middle of a Brontë course:
Living Room Literature is a simple idea: short literature courses for small groups of people looking to nurture or rekindle their love of books without leaving the comfort of a relaxed home environment. Classes – which take place in the informal setting of a living room: your own or mine depending on which course option you choose – are sociable but serious. I want to help busy people understand a text and its context in a deep way, but there’ll also be tea and cake to push us along.
Villette (Charlotte Brontë) and Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)
Both texts have long been unfavourably compared with the more celebrated Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights despite sharing many of their subversive qualities: Anne’s ‘tenant’ is a single mother living in hiding from her depraved alcoholic husband whilst Charlotte’s Villette is an uncompromising depiction of the effects of repressed passion on the psyche of its lonely and awkward narrator-governess, Lucy Snowe. We will delve deep into the novels’ key themes, consider aspects of style and explore the way both approach issues about the place of women in mid-Victorian society.
Neither of these novels appear much on syllabi in schools or even beyond so here’s a perfect opportunity to ponder the justice of this omission: literary turkeys or hidden gems?
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