Villette

Brussels, thinly disguised as Villette in the kingdom of Labassecour. Brontë mapped her own two years teaching at the Pensionnat Heger on the Rue d'Isabelle into it: the boarding school, the old Flemish streets, the park across the way, the cathedral where she once made confession. It brings Belgium into the atlas.

Lucy Snowe

St Paul's and the City of London

London, before the crossing · 8% through the novel

Finding myself before St. Paul’s, I went in; I mounted to the dome: I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple Gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad, blue sky, of early spring above.

Alone and newly freed, Lucy climbs the dome of St Paul's and walks the Strand and Cornhill, drinking in the City before she takes ship for the Continent. It is the last English ground under her feet, and the one place in the opening she names outright.

explicit St Paul's and the City are real and named in the text, but they lie some 320 km northwest of Villette, so the opening is flagged as an excursion before the book's Brussels setting.

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