A review by lapsedmarxist
Villette by Charlotte Brontë

4.0

ngl, this was a difficult read. and despite struggling through it, it ended up being very rewarding. charlotte does a good job depicting the complex nature of the human mind. the passage where lucy ends up taking some drugs by accident and has a hallucination kinda comes out of nowhere but is fantastically written. this is charlottes best passage across all her novels. however, the majority of the novel is really verbose and complex. charlotte is a difficult writer and villette is a really hard book to read. nonetheless, lucy is a fascinating character. she is very abstract and cerebral. she is also shy and introverted with a dark sense of humor and snarky wit. outwardly she seems a pushover. but inwardly she has an iron will. the contrast between her very rich inner life and her passive outer life is brilliantly done. she’s an amazingly rich tapestry of a character. what’s more, charlotte does try and do the whole ghost/supernatural thing in this novel. she tries to explain logically the supernatural stuff and it just comes off as extremely contrived. would have been best to have had her sister emily write those bits. just sayin.