George Eliot believed Villette "a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power."[3]
"There are so few books, and so many volumes. Among the few stands Villette."—George Henry Lewes
Virginia Woolf claims that Villette is Charlotte Brontë's "finest novel," and highlights its evocative descriptions of the natural world as a reflection of the main character's state of mind.[4]
The Daily Telegraph's Lucy Hughes-Hallett argues that Villette is greater than Brontë's most famous work, Jane Eyre. She states that the novel is "an astonishing piece of writing, a book in which phantasmagorical set pieces alternate with passages of minute psychological exploration, and in which Brontë’s marvellously flexible prose veers between sardonic wit and stream-of-consciousness, in which the syntax bends and flows and threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire.".[5]
Claire Fallon of The Huffington Post notes that Villette shares many themes with Brontë's previous works such as Jane Eyre yet highlights the dichotomy between the two novels' protagonists. "Villette bears a certain Brontëan resemblance to Jane Eyre -- gothic mysticism, spiritual intensity, bursts of passionate lyricism, a plain heroine making her way in an unfriendly world -- but is in many other ways its inverse. Jane Eyre works in sharp black and white, while Villette works in psychological and even factual grey areas. Where Jane’s specialness is stipulated, despite her poverty and plain looks, the heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe, is an unassuming figure who spends the majority of the novel as a quiet observer. Jane insists on her own agency, while Lucy is reactive at best. Yet it is Lucy who truly breaks free of the expected domestic fate."[6]
