Villette by Charlotte Bronte (Review)

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Bookshop.org | Harper Collins | TG Jones | Waterstones

Blurb

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness. 

Review

I tried to read Villette a few years ago and gave up just before I got to the half way point. I had clearly forgotten why I had given up and decided to try and finish the book this time. Thankfully I did manage to finish it this time but it seemed a very hard slog. I also really struggled with all the French in the book and found it broke up the dialogue when it kept switching between French and English. 

I love Jane Eyre and have read it many times but I just did not gel with Lucy Snowe in this book. She’s writing her story for the reader to read and so many times I was almost screaming at the book to get to the point. I understand that Lucy had a difficult childhood and had to fend for herself as an adolescent but she seemed to make some very random and risky decisions. I still can’t understand how she made the decision to spend most of her money and go to Villette when she had no friends there or even contacts there and didn’t even know the language. I never had a problem liking Jane as a character but I just could not bring myself to like Lucy. 

Lucy gets walked all over by the people around her. Even her own godmother drops her when someone more interesting arrives and then remembers her again after weeks and weeks of no contact. She gets put upon by her employer and she just takes it. However, the most frustrating part is that she lets a certain professor treat her like absolute dirt. He criticises her dress when she dares to wear a pink dress, he criticises her lack of intellect, her religion, in fact he pretty much criticises everything and then she spends the last few hundred pages of the novel crying about him when she is told he will be disappearing on a voyage. 

Villette is Charlotte Bronte’s last work and I will be honest it surprised me. I really expected a stronger main character with an overall maturity to the storyline but I just found it lacked the finesse that Jane Eyre had and also Jane Eyre was a much stronger character who didn’t take everything lying down. I found this book such a hard slog to read but I am glad I managed to read it. I give this book 3 out of 5 Dragons. 

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About the author

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was an English novelist and poet, and was the elder sister of Emily, Anne and Branwell Bronte.

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