Arts: Sister of the more famous Jane

Despite passion, eroticism and humour, Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre (possibly because, reader, she doesn't marry him). But a star cast on Radio 4 may change that.

At school, my English class was asked to write an extended essay on any work of literature we chose. I decided on Charlotte Bronte's last novel, Villette. It proved to be a rather unpopular choice.

Villette, I was told with a degree of scorn by the - all-male - English department, was too strongly autobiographical to merit close criticism. Like Matthew Arnold, who wrote at the time of the book's first publication in 1853 that "the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage", they considered Villette to be "disagreeable". Some of them had been at Cambridge during FR Leavis's ascendancy, and had absorbed at first hand his famous assertion in The Great Tradition that there was "only one Bronte". For him, Wuthering Heights assured the primacy of Emily Bronte over her sisters and, in a slighting put-down of admirers of Charlotte's genius, he allowed only that she had merely done something "interesting" with her personal experience, especially in Villette.

Critical fashions change, and in the two decades since my schooldays Charlotte Bronte's reputation as a writer has risen to new heights, helped in part by the emergence of feminist literary theory. There has been a sharp move away from the purely biographical interest that has always bedevilled serious consideration of her work, towards critical studies that emphasise the rich symbolism and poetic imagery of her novels, as well as their psychological complexity.

On a more popular level, there has also been a continuous stream of stage, television and film adaptations of Jane Eyre, the novel that made Charlotte famous and has remained hugely popular ever since. Villette, in contrast, has never received such widespread recognition, though few critics today would deny that it stands as Charlotte Bronte's most profound achievement. Lucasta Miller, who is completing a study of the Bronte myth, considers Villette to be "a distinctly uncomfortable read and definitely an acquired taste, but for those who persevere, it is undoubtedly Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece".

It remains true, however, that the novel's unsympathetic heroine, its relative lack of dramatic incident and its enigmatic ending which denies the story a romantic resolution, has made Villette difficult to popularise. This makes Radio 4's three-part adaptation of the novel, beginning on Easter Sunday, a daring choice for their classic serial slot - and a particularly welcome one.

In Villette, Charlotte Bronte forsakes the "unpruned fancies" of Jane Eyre in favour of a new sobriety; a sad, strong stoicism, based on her own chastened experience of love. She drew closely on her experience of the two years she had spent as a teacher in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger. There she had formed a passionate, but painfully unrequited, attachment to Constantin Heger, the Pensionnat's brilliant literature teacher and husband of the directrice, and the first person to recognise her extraordinary creative genius. Through Villette's portrayal of the relationship between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel, Charlotte Bronte seeks to make creative gain out of the personal loss and emotional deprivation she had suffered in her self-torturings over her beloved Monsieur Heger.

Lucy Snowe is an outsider. She is an orphan without social status, a teacher in a foreign school, and a Protestant in a Catholic country. She appears as an "inoffensive shadow" whose seeming passivity cloaks an attitude of rebellion that chafes at the restrictions that society places on women. But Lucy is also the archetypal unreliable narrator, whose concealment becomes a metaphor for psychological instability, and for the perils of repression in matters of the heart.

It is perhaps Lucy's evasiveness, and the reader's nagging suspicion that she can't be trusted, that has most discouraged dramatists from adapting Villette for other media. There have been two television versions, one in 1957 (with Jill Bennett as Lucy) and another in the early Seventies (with Judy Parfitt); there was also a stage adaptation at the Sheffield Crucible a couple of years ago. But this is a poor showing compared with the way in which Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have passed into the general culture via television and film.

James Friel, the adapter of the new Radio 4 Villette, who co-directed it with Catherine Bailey, agrees that the novel "is notoriously difficult to adapt". His solution has been to opt for a more straightforward narrative and to dispense with the "wicked authorial game". He allows that some of the slipperiness of the original, which he describes as "like a Rubic cube", has thereby been lost, but argues that in exchange you get a clearer and stronger dramatic line.

Friel and Bailey have assembled a fine cast: Catherine McCormack (in her first radio role) as Lucy Snowe; Joseph Fiennes as Dr John (whose relationship with Lucy is based on Charlotte Bronte's own vicissitudes in her friendship with her publisher, "the curled darling" of Cornhill, George Smith); James Laurenson as a fiery Paul Emanuel; and Harriet Walter as a superbly evil Madame Beck. And Friel makes no secret of his and Bailey's hopes for an eventual film version of Villette. He has written the screenplay already and believes that the time may be right for a big- screen adaptation. "Villette has everything," he says. "Passion, eroticism, humour. In so many ways, it is a very modern novel."

'Villette' is broadcast as Radio 4's Classic Serial at 3pm from Sun 4 April to Sun 18 April, and published on audiocassette by BBC Worldwide on Mon 5 April