Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

The anti-'Jane Eyre'

'Villette', Charlotte Bronte's last completed novel, is the anti-Eyre in many respects. First, the main character, Lucy Snowe, is a difficult, eccentric, almost misanthropic character, difficult to like. She makes herself disagreeable by being a willful contrarian. Bronte compounds this difficulty by strewing the novel with innumerable passages of untranslated French (it takes place in the town of Villette, a fictional counterpart to Brussels in the country of Labassecour, a fictional counterpart to Belgium) although the edition I read contained numerous footnotes in the back providing translations but in the process slowing down the reading of an already turgid novel. There are also just as many Biblical allusions. Lucy's Protestantism and the Catholicism of most of the other characters are a major theme.

The novel is also at least 100 pages longer than 'Jane Eyre' without the justification of being longer. It would have been improved immensely if edited substantially.

Lucy Snowe and her 496 page novel=Three stars