After Jane Eyre and 20 years before Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Elizabeth Von Arnim plays with the theme of the young & innocent woman falling in love with an older man, a widower. From the start, the character of Everard is intensely unlikeable and Lucy is portrayed as the young, passionate young woman she is, who can't see beyond appearances yet and chooses to overlook some appearances for the sake of her love. The clash of their characters is described from their two points of view in addition to that of Lucy's aunt, a spinster in all her glory. I enjoyed the psychological portrayal in the first quarter of the book but when it became repetitive and when it became clear that none of the characters was going to evolve, my reading started to drag. I felt horrified by Lucy's slow descent into the power of this hateful man, even though I valued the way the author stayed far away from any romanticization of their relationship - something that I'd missed in Jane Eyre but which, I think, Daphne du Maurier achieved with more subtlety, though she uses a lot more tools than just the relationship of the 3 characters written by Elizabeth Von Arnim. To me Vera is good classic, but I'm not surprised it didn't stand the test of time, at least not as much as The Enchanted April.