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The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title with Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel about Lucy Snowe, an impoverished and extremely truculent governess Pester’s book is divided into four theatrical acts, and this poem closes Act 4: although, strictly speaking, the collection ends with the coda ‘Heavy ending’, ‘Villette’ is the last thing that happens before the actors make their bow In it, the voice of the speaker and the actions of Brontë’s protagonist are unified, like two film reels playing simultaneously: ‘In the novel Villette,’ it begins, ‘either I or Lucy Snowe live and work in a girls’ school that either she or I found in a small French town’ The poem continues, explaining that I / Lucy have recently suffered a romantic disappointment with Dr Graham, their ‘heavy and imaginative crush’, and resolve to bury his letters, which they have invested with a ‘devotional adoration’ The poem ends in an ecstasy of submission:   In this gesture / in my gesture, Lucy Snowe rejects the possibility of possessing the letter She applies / I apply a fantastical value to the letter The letter passes into an earthed state of absence I use / Lucy uses burial as a way to disown the letter and to refuse being privately subjected by the letter She instead / I instead ecstatically ritualise her poverty / my poverty, and her otherness / my otherness to ownership of objects, and evacuate the self into love   VILLETTE, although well received at the time of its publication, disappeared from the mainstream literary consciousness soon after, and remained mostly ignored for the best part of a century In 1970, Kate Millett offered a radical reading of the novel in SEXUAL POLITICS that drew on earlier understandings (notably Virginia Woolf’s) of it as a proto-feminist text Lucy, for Millett, is a study in the effects of a ‘male-supremacist society’ upon a woman’s psyche: ‘She is bitter and she is honest; a neurotic revolutionary full of conflict, back-sliding, anger, terrible self-doubt, and an unconquerable determination to win through’   Later