the youth drama

I'm still reading the book, but frustrated immensely with not knowing what befell Lucy and her family between her last visit to her godmother and the time when she sets out to the Continent.

It's something disastrous where she loses all her ties, seems to implicate her godmother and cousin too, and oppresses her so much she even goes to confession with a Catholic priest, and the priest thinks it of such a nature that she would do better in giving her life to the church.

if it's never revealed what this disaster was (it seems even a shamefull one), are there any theories on what happened?

May I suggest that you do not view Villette as a story of a linear, ie. chronological perspective, but rather of music, where an emotion is repeated and each repetition is somewhat different. Read it to catch the mood, not the history.
You might be interested to take a look at the topic Charlotte Bronte's Villette where ksotikoula discusses some background material.

Oh, I had read these before I even started reading. Finished it, understand the attempt, but admittedly the meandering mood proze in the text plainly irritated me. There was too much of it.

I didn't like the book :) Made me feel like a prisoner in her to me disagreeable mind that lacks self-love and self-belief. The obscure who is obscure by choice, and we never learn why that is, although it seems inherent in her character even before the youth drama. In short, I felt barred from ever feeling sympathy with Lucy, because I don't know who Lucy is other than a self-flagelating personality for no apparent reason. To me mr Paul died on his way back, and well I just didn't care.

Paulina annoyed the hell out of me even more, as a child and adult. She's like the archetype of "femininity" that I've abhorred as long as I remember.

Things I liked in the book were the descriptions and opinions regarding Villette culture: Beck's method of surveillance, the way the girls revolt in classrooms, the behind your back scheming and checking instead of open confrontation... I'm Belgian, and I recognized a lot both as teacher and citizen. It was the sole angle I was able to enjoy Lucy: having Dutch Protestant roots 3-4 generations back and raised in an open as well as honest family culture in the country culture CB describes, as well as having experienced the most absurd prejudice from Roman Catholics when I was a child on the smallest stuff and an attempt to convert me at the age of 5-6 behind my parents' back.

It is the sole stuff within the story for me where Lucy refuses to yield out of inner conviction, out of faith with herself.

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Originally Posted by sweetsunray

Oh, I had read these before I even started reading. Finished it, understand the attempt, but admittedly the meandering mood proze in the text plainly irritated me. There was too much of it.

I didn't like the book :) Made me feel like a prisoner in her to me disagreeable mind that lacks self-love and self-belief. The obscure who is obscure by choice, and we never learn why that is, although it seems inherent in her character even before the youth drama. In short, I felt barred from ever feeling sympathy with Lucy, because I don't know who Lucy is other than a self-flagelating personality for no apparent reason. To me mr Paul died on his way back, and well I just didn't care...

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When you wrote “Senses are not just what the eye beholds, but also touch, hearing, taste and smell... and sensual excitement would shift more to those. Especially the touch would highten eroticism between them.”, I thought that of the many views of love, here is someone who has understood what the “ έρωτας ” is in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was written from a rush of feeling, the first part, while Villette has a longer gestation and is not so much of love as of its loss.
I think that when Charlotte edited the Wuthering Heights manuscript it gave her an insight and courage to attempt a new form of story-telling. The book is difficult, the consensus seems to be that you'll understand it only on a second reading, it is of memory, thus both unreliable and nonlinear, of loss and loneliness, of Lucy as well as of Charlotte's.
When you wrote, ”I didn't like the book .... I felt barred from ever feeling sympathy with Lucy, because I don't know who Lucy is”, I suspect that you are reflecting the feelings of many young women who look for empathy with the main character. Lucy's love is not of first hand description but of recollection. She is secretive, as Ksotokoula observed, thus posing another barrier to emotional affinity.
In reading of Villette, your experience “ as well as having experienced the most absurd prejudice from Roman Catholics when I was a child on the smallest stuff”, is very interesting since it corresponds to what F. MacDonald wrote off less than 20 years after Charlotte left the Hagers.
I would be grateful if you would permit me to ask a few questions, via the Private Messages option when you log-on to the Forum. It would help me in understanding Charlotte's Brussels experience.

CB uses Lucy as a narrator of what happens around her (whether by recollection or not is irrelevant to me... Jane Eyre is also a recollected story penned down years after) but in a distant way, as a detached onlooker. Like Nelly in Wuthering Heights is our story teller. Lucy is to be our eyes. However, it's not a story of those around her or those she witnessed, but supposed to be a story about herself (Like Jane Eyre is a story about herself). And she tries to insert Lucy back into the story as a character by having her extrapolate in some lyrical sense in long paragraphs about nothing really (the dropped letter in the garden for example).

It's as if Lucy doesn't know whether to be a Nelly or a Jane Eyre (but about irrelevant stuff). To me it's as if I'm reading something written by someone who's suffering from dissociation: describing events as objective as they can, yet they have emotional impact on the storyteller, but we have to content with some nonsensical association the storyteller suddenly comes up to in fact avoid us and especially herself from confronting what she feels (love, loss, ...). Lucy does indeed seem to suffer from dissocation in that she will have reason for a dictator. It is strange that Lucy should dissociate so when it's already long in the past, except if it's CB who's disociating at the time of writing because it reflected events she felt she was still living through. The manner of the narrative improves when the focus becomes Mr Paul. But as a whole, Villette narrative comes off as if CB didn't know how to tell a story, nor didn't know how to place her lead in the narrative, and tried to insert Lucy's inner world by inserting poetic proze about nothing in between.

That idea that CB didn't know how to write it, or had difficulty in writing it (because she was neck deep in it emotionally at the time), is increased with the events from start to end. Every day of Lucy's trip seems to be given almost equal importance, no matter how tedious. The interesting events seem to be almost glossed over, whereas the tedious bits are take too long (yet without thorough after-reflection of the interesting event). I understand that CB wants to show us that Lucy is but a little grey mouse whose life is not grand and unadventurous, but that doesn't mean she needs to write it in a way that I as reader become bored. It's better to gloss over the unimportant parts, and explore the bigger events more, instead. And I actually disagree with Lucy having a boring life: there's a gigantic youth drama that causes her much grieve and shame, she visits London, crosses the channel and goes to work and live in a foreign country, teaches 60 pupils, at some point makes pleasant friends, ... It's at least as eventful as my own life, and I ain't bored with mine.

btw, I just started to read Shirley, and there the narration is very satisfactory so far. The poetic proze even is a delight, because it has distinct reading rhythm.

Antwerpians are strange! Mais a chacun son.
However let us know your impressions when you finish.

i finished reading villette last night and - while i don't know that it is entirely appropriate to say i "loved" it - i did find it extremely powerful and engrossing. i was not in the least offended by lucy's standoffish-ness; it seemed to me that she was jealously guarding her most precious memories and that she was very selective in which she chose to share. it may well have been because of the strength of emotion CB was filled with, but i think it was quite deliberately done. i did not feel drawn to her in the way i did to jane eyre, but i felt an equal interest in her well-being and future. to me the end was hearbreak - for myself if not for the "self" lucy is willing to be publicly - even as an author of her own memoirs. lucy will survive and have her independence and her love - at least the memory of it. she says within her description of paulina and dr bretton: "Some real lives do-for some certain days or years-actually anticipate the happiness of Heaven; and, I believe, if such perfect happiness is once felt by good people (to the wicked it never comes), its sweet effect is never wholly lost. Whatever trials follow, whatever pains of sickness or shades of death, the glory precedent still shines through, cheering the keen anguish, and tinging the deep cloud."

I think it's a clever novel. Charlotte's writing a character who deliberately has no identity. She is invisible and people have formed prejudices about her that she conforms to in an exterior sense but not in an interior one. Lucy is destined to be a spectator (rather a depressing sentiment) but that does not make her dull. She's just one of those people who fall under the radar.