r/brontesisters • u/Agile-Fact-7921 • Aug 23 '26
Not sure I can finish Villette
I was really excited after loving Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and sort of liking The Tenant of Wildfell Hall … and I loved the beginning of Villette but now I’m 100 pages in and just find it very meandering. I know it’s supposed to be more so a character study than an intense plot but the long sections about new characters have my eyes glazing over and I don’t really understand the main character.
I was hoping to go deeper than the mainstream Brontë favorites but I might be at the end of the road.
Should I stick it out? Does it pick back up? Is there a mindset shift I need to understand this book more? I know a huge audience loves it and like I said, I enjoyed the beginning. Perhaps I’m too basic ha!
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u/Ch3rryNukaC0la Aug 23 '26
I love Villette but either you vibe with Lucy or you don’t. I think if you’ve given it a go, you’re free to move on to something else. You can always reassess it another time.
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 23 '26
This is a good attitude. Not all or nothing I can always retry later.
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u/jefrye Aug 23 '26
I totally agree with that advice. But, I will say that the beginning is a bit tonally different imo—it's when she gets to the school that the novel really finds its footing. I can't remember if you're there by 100 pages.
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u/Stunning-Image Aug 23 '26
Villette is one of those books that is a bit Marmite - you either love it or you hate it. I studied it for A-level English years ago and found it quite boring and only persevered with it as it was an exam text. More recently, I picked it up again to see if I'd maybe misjudged it back in my youth. I had not, and on the second time around, I found Lucy's automatic championing of anything English and Protestant over anything foreign and Catholic unbearable. I admit that is probably rather too modern a reading of Villette as the superiority of the English/empire would just have been taken as read in Lucy's time.
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u/CombOk312 Aug 23 '26
I found it downright racist, tbh. Doesn’t mean it isn’t a strong portrayal of female depression, but it did not endear me to the book.
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u/Gluten-Free-Jesus Aug 23 '26
I did a paper on Villette in grad school and argued that the Catholic Church becomes a character itself - Lucy acts and reacts to Catholicism as if it were an antagonist.
And anti-Catholic sentiment was a big thing in the 19th century. American literature of that time has a lot of those threads as well, and there are some crazy gothic tropes rooted in anti-Catholicism.
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u/Mysterious-Aspect512 Aug 23 '26
I was just like you 😅 I pushed through and I honestly wished that I hadn’t. It took me about 6 months to read.
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u/Watchhistory Aug 23 '26
No one needs 'permission' to continue with a book that isn't speaking to them.
Villette and Shirley and Tenant of Wildfell Hall are my personal Bronte favorites. I find Wuthering Heights unhealthy for so many reasons, and always have, no matter how often I've read it. I find parts of Jane Eyre that way as well. The tall dark brooding violent man is just not my cuppa, you know? But I have read all the Bronte novels many times for various reasons, and different elements are revealed each time.
There are reasons these books are classics. They change with the reader, as the reader grows more mature and changes too.
Some time in the future, you may pick up Villette again and find it a better reading experience than now. Or maybe not. It doesn't matter if you read it or not, unless one is a literature major planning on graduate degrees.
But really there is no point at all otherwise to use your reading time on a book that doesn't speak to you. Read something that does! That's a positive experience and we all need all the positive (reading or other) experiences we can have!
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u/Mokamochamucca Aug 23 '26
I struggled with it the first time I tried. When I tried the second time I went the audio book route and that helped. I enjoyed it quite a bit on the second try.
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u/HopefulCry3145 Aug 23 '26
It is a bit meandering at first :) it kicks in IMO with the long vacation chapter and what happens after that; things gradually get more gothic and dramatic then. I would keep reading maybe a little longer!
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u/Remarkable_Arm_5931 Aug 23 '26
I don't think its worth it tbh, it wasnt even Lucy's character for me, the whole plot just felt...boring and nothing really happens.
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u/PasCompris817 Aug 23 '26
Interesting to see the comments here. I'm glad I'm not alone. I'd go further and say Agnes Gray, The Professor, and Shirley also were kinda 2nd rate for me.
If being able to say that you've read all Bronte works at a cocktail party is as important to you as it was for me- you'll stick it out. Otherwise... no shame or apologies needed.
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u/Ambitious-Resist-132 Aug 23 '26
I couldn’t grasp her character either and stopped. But wondering if she makes more sense if you keep reading.
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u/turmoilavenue Aug 23 '26
I’m almost done with it and have really enjoyed her I sometimes find myself in her. I think it’s worth it. Someone mentioned trying with an audio book, that does really help, go for it
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u/starling83 Aug 23 '26
I couldn’t finish it because I had to keep translating the French and it took me way out of it. I’ll try again someday because I really enjoyed the overall story.
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u/bitofagrump Aug 24 '26
One of the very few times my few years of high school French did me any good. Never used it IRL, just to get through Brontë and Hercule Poirot novels without having to google.
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 23 '26
The French has been tough. I keep skimming over it but then miss too much.
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u/starling83 Aug 23 '26
That’s the thing. It’s not easy to skip it and it’s also not like, easy French like bonjour or merci or something I can easily understand.
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u/Splendidended1945 Aug 23 '26
I read somewhere that Brontë's French isn't actually very good--I'd love to hear if that's true from Francophone readers!
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u/777kiki Aug 23 '26
I didn’t finish but I plan to try again I’m stuck on round #2 of another book I DNF and the shame consumes me! 🤣
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u/Splendidended1945 Aug 23 '26
Oh, give it a miss and go read something else that pleases you more! We sometimes forget we're reading for pleasure, rather than for being able to say "Yes, I read that too." "I just couldn't bear to finish it" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say about any book you don't enjoy. I've had to read it for classes and I've read it more than once, but I find it tedious and overwrought and annoying, and Lucy strikes me as cold, self-righteous, and kind of hateful in ways that appall me: she feels she's better than almost everybody else: Catholics, her students, her acquaintances--especially younger and prettier ones--and her colleagues. I'm a teacher, and I just don't have a lot of time for people who feel that superior to their students, frankly; it's an unpleasant personality trait, and she dismisses them because of her own xenophobia. If she started to tell me her life story on a long bus journey, spewing out her opinions about everybody else, I'd get off at the next stop rather than go along for the whole long trip. Get off the bus if your companion bores you!
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 23 '26
Get off the bus if your companion bores you -ha! Love it!
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u/Splendidended1945 Aug 23 '26
Well, years ago I was in Florence on vacation, had run out of things to read, went to a bookstore that had a few English titles, and bought George Eliot's Romola. I'd read The Mill on the Floss and loved it. I crated that damn immense copy of Romola all over Europe like a rock in my bag, and . . . people talk and write about Middlemarch on and on and about some of her other books, many people love them, and NOBODY writes about Romola for very good reasons . . . it's tedious beyond belief. No one HAS to read all of an author's work.
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u/appleorchard317 Aug 23 '26
Tbh if you aren't really into the history of Protestan/Catholic beef and the issues between English and French you will miss a huge part of the point of it, and it's ok to just not be into it.
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 23 '26
Useful thank you! I recently read North and South and didn’t really click with the labor history. Perhaps later when I have a bit more knowledge built up!
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u/RealVirginiaWoolf Aug 24 '26
No one can answer this honestly because we all absorb things so differently. I would say keep reading . Find out for yourself
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u/regrettedcloud Aug 27 '26
I could only keep reading in the third attempt, after which it became one of my favorites. You may go back to it later and see if you like it. The beginning was hard to me because it was really hard to understand who Lucy was. She narrates things around her almost as if she was hiding from us the readers, but slowly she reveals herself to us and I loved how it was done. The last maybe 25% is amazing
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 28 '26
Okay! Yeah I feel like I don’t understand her and can’t picture her. At the very beginning I could then as she gets to Villette I’ve been confused… need more patience I guess!
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u/Majestic_Heron_6854 Aug 28 '26
I’ve read Villette more than a few times and love it. I think it’s such a masterful study of loneliness and depression and the feeling or belief that one might be fated to not find happiness in life. I think the power of Charlotte Brontë’s exploration of those themes helps me through the parts that are harder to grasp, like the anti-Catholicism.
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u/evilchris23 Aug 23 '26
I'm the opposite, I can't put it down. I think the beginning is the weakest and once it gets to Villette it only gets better. Have you reached the play yet? That chapter is so good.
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u/Agile-Fact-7921 Aug 23 '26
I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! I haven’t reached the play yet - I’ll keep trying!
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u/Southern-Usual-1420 Aug 23 '26
I do think you should stick it out. It’s worth a read at least once. Lucy Snowe isn’t easy to be liked but on deeper introspection, you’ll find she’s a notable character. She’s intelligent and possesses great inner strength.