T his thesis addresses how Charlotte Brontë 's Villette creates a sympathetic economy that challenges nineteenth-century English gender convention and rst-person novelistic narrator-reader tradition. It posits that Brontë's social critique of gender convention in nineteenth-century England is related to her novelistic critique of narrator-reader tradition in rst-person novels. In the same way that gender convention dictates the context in which social sympathy should be felt thereby

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... gendered power relationships, novelistic tradition also dictates the context in which readerly sympathy should be felt and also endorses a power relationship between narrator and reader. However, this thesis concludes that Brontë's creation of a contentious and oppositional narrator in Villette ultimately reverses this latter power relationship between narrator and reader.