I can never read that opening as anything but a giant bitchslap at all the (male) critics who called Jane Eyre romantic, naive, fanciful, exaggerated, blah blah blah. And there was an almost perverse streak in Charlotte, so she's like, Hah, you want something non-Romantic and full of social criticism and politics? FINE, here you go. For her to write such a different book, especially after Jane Eyre was such a huge smash, took a lot of guts. She's writing THIS IS NOT JANE EYRE II in big letters right at the start.

What's fascinating to me is in Villette she really did it -- there's almost no plot, but it's as heightened as Jane Eyre, and Lucy's interior psychological landscape is really wild and vivid.