Charlotte Brontë’s fictional epistles

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is notable for its engagement with epistolarity. In particular, its ending finally resolves issues that the author has wrestled with throughout her fictional work and in some real-world correspondence. By bringing the reader’s attention to the ontology of letters, Villette is able to foreground the primacy of writing, and to proffer it as a potential bridge between souls, as well as showing how the physical world is transcended by means of this ontology.