Villette: 4

PERFECT book that keeps a reader waiting and reflects actual emotion.

Written at a very lonely point in Bronte's life, this book goes back into her history and turns sadnesses of her life into happinesses. However, the ending is not a happy one. I felt like it was not as satisfying as Jane Eyre. Lucy is far too mysterious, we never get to know her.

Be careful which edition you buy of this work. It is lovely, don't get me wrong, and it's funny -- Charlotte Bronte's characters have a lot of spunk -- but there are some long love passages in French you do not want to miss, and most copies of classics do not have translations! Get the Oxford World's Classics edition if you can; the last Penguin I looked at did not have footnotes or translations.

Villette - astonishing! Difficult to decide whether this is a book to love or loathe; no middle ground seems possible. Lucy Snowe is a compelling, engaging narrator; her sharp sarcasm pricks holes in the most inflated personalities and makes us laugh at life's absurdities. But at the same time, Bronte's level-headed narrator is caught in a morass of despair and loneliness from which she never completely escapes. The storyline becomes enmeshed in a dark, surreal web, unsettling and discouraging; this reviewer almost gave up on the book halfway through. Lucy Snowe, like Jane Eyre, can find beauty in unlikely places; but unlike her earlier counterpart, it seems that happiness, for Lucy at least, is too good to be real. Engaging, poetic, thought-provoking, skilfully created, deeply unsettling and profoundly dark. A mysterious, tragic narrative.

I was surprised to be the first to comment on this deeply felt work by Charlotte Bronte. Although Jane Eyre will always be my sentimental favorite, I agree with the many critics who see Villette as Charlotte Bronte's best work. Villette's heroine is the lonely and unlovely Lucy Snowe who struggles to free herself from sorrowful past memories of which the details the reader is kept uninformed, and to quell her natural desires for a richer life- full of love, friendship, stimulation, and enjoyment- which she believes is hopelessly out of her reach. Anyone who has ever struggled with loneliness will sympathize with Lucy, whose aloneness Bronte conveys with heartbreaking pathos.This novel may be a hard read for some who are accustomed to lighter fare. It is certainly not a book that can be read in a day but one that must be slowly enjoyed over a period of time, preferably with a cup of tea.....

What irks me about the other reader reviews is that so many of them seem to cast Lucy Snow's soul in modern terms in the hopes of convincing the readers of the reviews that the book is accessible to them. I take the opposite tack. It is WE who have something to learn from the Victorians and their masterworks, rather than (if time could be reversed) the other way around. Lucy Snow is a spiritual hero, a concept seemingly lost in our modern age, to judge by most of the reviews anyway. The very name "Lucy" signifies a spiritual light along with a sexual purity signified by "Snow." that all of us in the modern age would do well to ponder and reasses our own souls thereby. I realize, of course, that the term "soul" is dreadfully outdated for many readers. But read and learn that there is such a beautiful thing, not to be psychoanalyzed to dissolution. Read, for example:"No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happpiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divive dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth blooms and golden fruitage of Paradise." Through all of Lucy's companionless travails through unrequited and partially requited love, we feel the own deep personal love and light shining from her deep sensitive soul. It reminds me of nothing so much as the poetry of Emily Dickinson...In fact, I would go so far to say that those without an appreciation of great poetry will gain little from reading this poetic novel. - Unrequited love builds character and, paradoxically, allows that love to become spiritual (There really is such a thing!) NOT "sublimated." So, if you can relate to Emily Dickinson, to Yeats when he tells us that if his lifelong love for Maud Gonne had been requited he might have "thrown poor words away and been content to live." or to Emily Dickinson's "Not one of all the purple host who took the flag to-day can tell the definition so clear, of victory, as he, defeated, dying, on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph break, agonized and clear." then pick up this book and follow Lucy through her travails. If you're looking for an easy reading page turner, forget it. Lucy Snow is a chacter to be admired and emulated, not looked down upon in presumptuous, self-righteous pity. "For those that have ears, let them hear."