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Oct 14, 2011BethHMW rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Villette is a study in patience both for Lucy and the reader. Lucy's existence and the multitude of plights she deals with are rather dull and Lucy as a character is rather unsympathetic. Although she is the narrative voice, she doesn't truly appear in the narrative at the outset, with the focus given rather to supporting characters. Thus is the trend set in place of supporting characters being far more interesting than Lucy, who while an upstanding individual isn't compelling in her own right and tends towards being irritating with her frequent soliloquies on the nature of her solitary life and its hardships. The descriptive and more literary passages are longer than necessary with descriptive phrases always coming in sets of three when a single one would be far more effective. While exploring the experience of a young woman teaching abroad, the narrative has no overarching major plot and seems like Lucy to drift slowly from one point to another. Intriguing as being the most autobiographical of Charlotte Bronte's novels, it remains a very poor cousin of the far more brilliant work that is Jane Eyre.