Synopses & Reviews
Charlotte Brontë's final masterpiece powerfully portrays a woman struggling to reconcile love, jealousy, and a fierce desire for independence.
Having fled a harrowing past in England, Lucy Snowe begins a new life teaching at a boarding school in the great capital of a foreign country. There, as she tries to achieve independence from both outer necessity and inward grief, she finds that her feelings for a worldly doctor and a dictatorial professor threaten her hard-won self-possession. Published in 1853, Charlotte Bronte's last novel was written in the wake of her grief at the death of her siblings. It has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as a striking modernity of psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness.
Synopsis
With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Bronte reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Bronte's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There, she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquetter. This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey--a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.
From the Paperback edition.
Synopsis
First published in 1853, "Villette" is Bronte's most accomplished and deeply felt work. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, recounts a turbulent life's journey--a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.
About the Author
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), a poor clergyman's daughter from Yorkshire, England, worked as a teacher and governess before her publication of Jane Eyre won her instant fame. She went on to produce three more novels before dying at the age of thirty-eight.