Villette - Charlotte Brontë

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Title: Villette Author: Charlotte Brontë Genre: Classics Rating: 8/10 # pages: Audiobook Date read: April, 2008

Summary: Arguably Brontë's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette,flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new file as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her freindship with a wordly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë's strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free.

Review: If you read this book, be sure to get a translation where all the French has been translated as well (if nothing else then as foot- or endnotes) as the one I listened had long paragraphs in French. I know that at the time of writing all educated English-women spoke French as well so Charlotte wouldn't have thought twice of using it in her books, but while I don't think I lost anything plot-wise, it was frustrating to not be able to understand all that was going on.

Apart from that I really enjoyed the book. It was exactly how I feel a 'classic' should be and fully lived up to the expectations set for me by other books of that period and especially "Jane Eyre". With one exception. I did not like the ending. The book is 42 chapters long, but ought to have ended after the 41st. The last chapter was unexpected and felt very much like the ending of "Jane Eyre" before Thursday Next got her hands on it in "The Eyre Affair". Had it not been for the ending I'd probably have rated the book 9 or even 10 out of 10 because I loved the rest of it - both plot and atmosphere.

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