Gypsy Reviews

Originally posted at Gypsy ReviewsAs the very last classic in my Christmas book haul, it was beginning to be tiring being saddled with these classics to finish reading before I could start tackling my TBR pile so that being said, I didn’t really have much patience when reading Villette so that might have influenced the entire experience for me. Nonetheless, Villette was an example of Charlotte Brontë’s fantastic storytelling.Lucy is a peculiar character, she can be a bit blunt at times and does not tolerate nonsense, she’s fearless and so incredibly witty. You might not be used to how distant she can be because she is nothing like Jane Eyre. You might say Lucy is unfeeling but she is simply a women who understands her position in life and does what she must to survive and to make an honest living. I appreciated how real Lucy’s situation was, unlike many classics where the heroine’s life is concentrated so much on their marriage, Villette looks on the life of a single woman who does not rely on marriage to live out her life.You can really see Brontë’s own mark in her storytelling, by withdrawing the details she manages to surprise you and sweeps you off your feet in disbelief. Her prose was beautiful and I wish I had had more of the patience to appreciate it. However, I found some coincidences just too good to be true especially how Lucy found so many familiar faces in Villette, if it had been in a town where all the characters had met before but Villette was a place none of them have been before at the same time. I just couldn’t believe Lucy was in the same place with so many people she knew.The romance was actually quite predictable, I saw it coming way back in the beginning of the story and I felt really bad for Lucy because I wanted her to be happy. Ultimately, Villette reminds you for every woman’s happy ending where they marry the husband of their dreams, there is a woman who doesn’t and grows old unmarried. It’s a sad story but one that is so real and full of pure emotion from Brontë’s own experience.Villette provides you with a myriad of characters from the soft-spoken Dr. Bretton to the vivacious Ginevra. Each character has their adverse effect on Lucy and impacts her life in some way or another and through her attitude towards these characters you can see what kind of character she is.Villette never did have that effect that Jane Eyre had on me but it far surpasses Shirley and I appreciated the reality of the situation in the novel very much. It is a perfect example that fairy tales just don’t exist sometimes and we need to face reality in the eye and make do with what we have and who’s to say, we won’t be happy with that?