Charlotte Bronte was thirty-six when she wrote Villette, and the peaks of her life"s experience were already passed. The profound impressions of her childhood, the day-dream world in which for so many years she had taken a feverish and creative pleasure, the dazzling success of Jane Eyre the all but unendurable grief of the loss of her two sisters - all these were now in the past. She was an established and successful author, and she was alone. Her earlier novels, The Professor, rejected by many publishers and now laid aside, Jane Eyre, and the greater part of Shirley, had all been written in an atmosphere of intimate sympathy, the three sisters working together on their different tales, three heads bent attentively over the same table. Now Charlotte was alone, lost youth, with the whole experience of her lost youth, with the world of her imagination still splendidly vital, but with a heart sobered by what it had learned of life. Another writer might have turned to some untried field...