What a dreadfully painful read. It was long-winded, as many books from that period were, but worse so in that there was so much of the book that could have been omitted. It was grand without being epic, and there was nothing keeping me from putting down the book and giving up. The characters were almost all over dramatic, and the only interesting ones were the servants. Worse so, I was lead through the entire story with minimal foreshadowing, references, and callbacks, and was slapped in the face with the terrible ending where everything was 'neatly' described in a few pages. No revelations or discoveries through plot, just a spewing of what looked like an outline on how things work out. All that effort for such an anti-climactic ending with a character who was boring and didn't deserve a good ending! There were some moments where I felt sympathy for her, but not enough to make me want to open up the book instead of sleeping.

There's far too much going on without a good story to keep you interested and the ending is only a relief because it's finally over. If you want to familiarize yourself with the genre or the period, read something else - anything else - because this is a poor example and a boring read. If the author had cut out some good sized chunks of the story, referring to them through words instead of slowly showing off every single thing (I'm not referring to show not tell, just cutting out unimportant bits) - and if it had done with a professional look-over, it could have been there. The skeleton of a decent story is there (and there were some interesting scenes), but the result was the obesity of fiction. It's not fair to compare books from different periods, but something like this simply would not have been released today and the length isn't the problem - length is fine when it's filled with substance - it's the pointless filling. This is one book that would be better done in retellings; the original is far too tedious to put up with even when compared to other similar works. For a classic, this is one book I would never recommend.