Villette FROM THE PUBLISHER
"With neither friend nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a teacher in Brussels, Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel is a study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances." This edition includes a new introduction, which examines the novel's social and historical context, a chronology of Charlotte Bronte's life and full explanatory notes.
SYNOPSIS
"Villette! Villette! Have you read it?" exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontﾽ's final novel appeared in 1853. "It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.
FROM THE CRITICS
Virginia Woolf
Brontë’s finest novel.
AudioFile - Jenny H. Lawrence
Nadia May presents Lucy Stone, the sensitive, yet indomitable, young English woman who ventures off to France without means or family support. Whether crisply teaching English at Madame Beckﾽs school for girls in Villette or lonely and despairing in a foreign culture, May convincingly portrays the many moods and complex character of Charlotte Brontﾽs heroine. Also, May seamlessly shifts accents and tone, distinguishing the rest of the characters that crowd this Gothic novel old and young, English and French, male and female. Her many voices, with subtle timing, sweep us at a quick clip through a narrative of psychological insight and vividly rendered places, people and landscapes. J.H.L. ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine
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