Rating: 
Summary: ....
Review: Villette is such an excellent novel. Very glad I read this.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: Villette is such an excellent novel. Very glad I read this.
Rating: 
Summary: An Emotionally Moving Story
Review: Villette offers beautiful description of a young woman's life and the troubles that she is faced with. Although at times the plot is rather boring and slow-moving, Villette is worth reading. It is a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Astounding story of pure love and the sorrow of loss.
Review: What a wonderful novel of the sweet joy of love and the bitter anguish of loss. Villette should be required reading for all students of liturature for its use of symbolism and the narrators depth of soul. This book truly touches the reader at the deepest level of emotion through the narrator's depth of passion and feeling as expressed so eloquently by Bronte. I could not recomend a book with more heartfelt support as I do this one. Read it and see.
Rating:
Summary: A harrowing account of an heroic soul
Review: What irks me about the other reader reviews is that so many of them seem to cast Lucy Snow's soul in modern terms in the hopes of convincing the readers of the reviews that the book is accessible to them.
I take the opposite tack. It is WE who have something to learn from the Victorians and their masterworks, rather than (if time could be reversed) the other way around. Lucy Snow is a spiritual hero, a concept seemingly lost in our modern age, to judge by most of the reviews anyway. The very name "Lucy" signifies a spiritual light along with a sexual purity signified by "Snow." that all of us in the modern age would do well to ponder and reasses our own souls thereby. I realize, of course, that the term "soul" is dreadfully outdated for many readers. But read and learn that there is such a beautiful thing, not to be psychoanalyzed to dissolution. Read, for example:"No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happpiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divive dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth blooms and golden fruitage of Paradise." Through all of Lucy's companionless travails through unrequited and partially requited love, we feel the own deep personal love and light shining from her deep sensitive soul. It reminds me of nothing so much as the poetry of Emily Dickinson...In fact, I would go so far to say that those without an appreciation of great poetry will gain little from reading this poetic novel. - Unrequited love builds character and, paradoxically, allows that love to become spiritual (There really is such a thing!) NOT "sublimated."
So, if you can relate to Emily Dickinson, to Yeats when he tells us that if his lifelong love for Maud Gonne had been requited he might have "thrown poor words away and been content to live." or to Emily Dickinson's "Not one of all the purple host who took the flag to-day can tell the definition so clear, of victory, as he, defeated, dying, on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph break, agonized and clear." then pick up this book and follow Lucy through her travails. If you're looking for an easy reading page turner, forget it.
Lucy Snow is a chacter to be admired and emulated, not looked down upon in presumptuous, self-righteous pity. "For those that have ears, let them hear."
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as Jane Eyre, but then again...
Review: Who can compare to that masterpiece of a novel? Villette was a literary masterpiece as well, but in its own way. Villette was more a tale of one woman's finding of herself than a love story. The heroine, Lucy Snowe, lived her entire life under the stereotypes of each of the people who knew her. (i.e. John Graham Bretton, Mrs. Bretton, Ginevra Fanshawe, Paulina Home/de Bassompierre) She had to realize who she truly was and not who she appeared to her friends. Perhaps it took a while for the plot to develop, but when she discovered who she was and who knew her best (can't tell you who that is), the genius of the novel came to life. It won't be as breathtaking as Jane Eyre, but nor will it be a disappointment. Villette is an opportunity to take off the mask and be who we really are.
| 
