Abstract

Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools and other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world … there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank, alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off, the visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicates remembrance, comes no more. Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whorling in the very vortex of life … The hermit – if he be a sensible hermit – will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter… (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 1979: 348)