PC Villette

Bronte, Charlotte

£9.99

With neither friends 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.

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Publish Date: 24/06/2004
ISBN: 9780140434798 Category: Tag:

Description

Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s powerful autobiographical novel of one woman’s search for true love, edited with an introduction by Helen M. Cooper in Penguin Classics.

With neither friends 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, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings – first for the school’s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë’sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

Helen M. Cooper’s new introduction places the novel in the context of Brontë’s life and career and argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-55), eldest of the Brontë sisters, was born in Thornton, West Yorkshire. Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under the pen-name Currer Bell, and was followed by Shirley (1848) and Vilette (1853). In 1854 Charlotte Brontë married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died during her pregnancy on 31 March 1855 in Haworth, Yorkshire. The Professor was posthumously published in 1857.

If you liked Villette, you may enjoy Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette
George Eliot

‘Her finest novel’
Virginia Woolf

Additional information

Weight 458 g
Dimensions 198 × 129 × 28 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

611

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

823.8 (edition:22)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K