I've started resurrecting ancient posts; never let it be said I don't care...

I'm crawling through Vilette. I'm not surprised I never finished it before - it's bloody interminable. Lucy Snowe is just...too old fashioned for me to warm to. I'm sick of her humbly bearing privations suited to her lot with patient fortitude - I'm also sick of nothing happening for 154 pages.

There's one line that particularly chilled me:

Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants the hornbook, turning silk dresses and making children's frocks. Not that true contentment dignified this infatuated resignation: my work had neither charm for my taste, nor hold on my interest; but it seemed to me a great thing to be without heavy anxiety, and relieved from intimate trial; the negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter.

...for who is interested in a character who wants nothing? I don't want to read about someone being contented with their lot. Go and chase happiness! Be brilliant! Seize it by the throat! But of course, she's quite resigned to sit and spin. Doubtless fascinating as a portrait of the Victorian woman, I don't know why if she's so bored with the life of reality she persists to tell us about it in such excruciating detail...I am reading it a few pages at a time.