@WhiskyXray
Re: Lucy's family disaster, I can't make it out. I guessed the first time that perhaps her mother had died and her father had been committed to trial for her murder, and eventually hanged. But the time-frame doesn't fit; justice didn't hang about in those days
you were tried, convicted and had a noose around your neck before rigid mortis had set in on your victim! So I think Lucy's parents must have been notorious in some way, perhaps engaged openly in vice sexual or perhaps drug-related-- and their final public condemnation / arrest must have been the cataclysm.
Oddly enough, I was reading through some family documents and found a potted memoir penned by a female relative towards the end of her life c.1880. After a terse list of dates and major events, she wrote something like, "There were of course many private tragedies in these years, but it is not supposed that they would be of interest to the reader." And I found that delightful. But Lucy was far worse, of course- not merely primly omitting the facts, but goading the reader, sneering that they are too feeble-minded to cope with reality, so let them imagine any pretty fantasy they like. She is a cowbag and God I love her.
I have just put Bleak House on my e-reader. Thanks.
Oh, you're much more LURID than my Villette imaginings, which never got beyond dead parents and reversals of fortune wiping out all the family money, and epidemics wiping out whatever family was left!
You've made me go and look it up now.
All Lucy actually says about it is:
I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society.
which sounds like perhaps her parents are already dead (kinsfolk sounds more distant than immediate family?) but Mrs B sees something ahead -- terminal illness, bankruptcy, both?
Then she's apprehensive when Mrs Bretton gets a letter:
I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication: to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed to pass.
And then when she leaves Bretton:
betook myself home, having been absent six months. It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my kindred. Well! the amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass—the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest?
Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time—a long time—of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished.
She sounds as though she's not fond of these 'kindred' when she reuturns home, but the metaphor makes it sound like a collective disaster, and something related to it cuts off contact with her godmother...?
I do wish one could ask CB -- I'm much more interested in Lucy's pre-Miss Marchmont life than I am in whether Monsieur Paul survives his shipwreck or not (as I don't have any kind of 'sunny imagination'. But she wouldn't say, probably. She always strikes me as probably deeply narky in company.
Lucy is indeed a cowbag of the best possible variety.