Most fascinating to me is Lucy Snowe's character.

This time around, I appreciated it one hundred percent more than I did the first time.

Yet that's exactly how I approached it as a teen at Uni, because we all just wanted to get abreast of our huge mountain of texts and churn out the essays required. You'd miss too much of what it's really all about.

I'd go so far as to say that I wouldn't even take seriously the review of anyone who gallops through, because speed is evidently not the spirit in which Charlotte wrote it. She invites us to consider how her frequent cultural and literary analogies apply to her life, and by extension, our own. I'm sure our benefit in reading it is in direct proportion to the amount of time we're prepared to pause and reflect on Lucy's word choices, and the apt imagery she draws from all sorts of places, including scripture and mythology. Nor is it the sort of book we pick up to knock off a few chapters in our down time. We should keep away from Charlotte Bronte's books when all we want is a quick and leisurely read. It takes effort, but leaves us feeling fitter in our mind and spirit. To use an exercise simile, this book is like a gym workout. First is John Graham Bretton, a young doctor she knew when they were both in their teens, and second is Monsieur Paul Emanuel, the professor of literature at the school. It's based on Charlotte Bronte's time as an English teacher at a girls' boarding school, or 'pensionnat' in Brussels, and her alter-ego is a serious and reflective young woman named Lucy Snowe, who falls for two men within the pages of the story. My first time through, as a Uni English student, was very sketchy in my mind. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey - a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a Belgian boarding school in the town of Villette. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power.

Villette bronte