I really wanted to like this one. I liked Jane Eyre quite a bit and I had high hopes for Charlotte Brontë’s last novel.

I liked it at first — though I’m a bit disappointed with the blurb on the back (there’s a post — what makes a good jacket/back blurb); I didn’t get the sense that Lucy had a “unhappy past” that she was “in flight” from. I enjoyed the detail fo Lucy’s childhood, the relationship between Graham and Polly, and even Lucy’s job with Miss Marchmont. But once she gets to Villette, things slow way down.

I managed to stay interested through volume 2. I thought the whole Dr. John drama was fun. Especially the bit when Lucy realizes who he his (or rather, the bit when she lets us, as readers, know who he is). But as the book wore on, I began to care less and less about Lucy and her life. It took a l-o-n-g time to get to the main point of the book — at least according to the back blurb again: her relationship with fellow teacher M. Paul and Madame Beck’s attempts to keep them apart. Honestly, by the time I got around to their relationship I was fed up. Fed up with the oh-so-helpful endnotes (great for translating the French, but kind of annoying otherwise), fed up with M. Paul and his annoying attempts to control Lucy, fed up with the excesses of Victorian literature.

So, I read the last chapter, discovered that M. Paul left Lucy and possibly died in a shipwreck, and called it quits.

Maybe I’m just not meant to read so much Brontë. A little goes a long way in this case.