House in Daisy Lane. This is an illustrator's impression of the cottage in which Frances and William Crimsworth are living at the end of Charlotte Brontë's The Professor. Source: Brontë, frontispiece.
There is a dreamlike quality about the Crimsworths' home: a scent of domestic bliss pervades the whole scene:
My house is a picturesque and not too spacious dwelling, with low and long windows, a trellised and leaf-veiled porch over the front door, just now, on this summer evening, looking like an arch of roses and ivy. The garden is chiefly laid out in lawn, formed of the sod of the hills, with herbage short and soft as moss, full of its own peculiar flowers, tiny and starlike, imbedded in the minute embroidery of their fine foliage. At the bottom of the sloping garden there is a wicket, which opens upon a lane as green as the lawn, very long, shady, and little frequented; on the turf of this lane generally appear the first daisies of spring—whence its name — Daisy Lane; serving also as a distinction to the house. [219-20]
In his analysis of the novel, Timothy Gao argues that Brontë's "implausible story of successful self-help" is not to be criticised for abjuring "sober realism," but appreciated for the way it knowingly "plays" with the realities of the time "to create narrative gratification where no material gratification exists" (68). The choice of scene for the frontispiece of this edition of the novel seems to acknowledge the primacy of wish-fulfilment in the closing chapter.
Image acquisition and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the source, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite it in a print one. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Bibliography
Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. London: Smith, Elder, 1889. Internet Archive. Contributed by the New York Public Library. Web. 30 June 2023.
Gao, Timothy. Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. [Review.
Created 30 June 2023