Villette

Product Description

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith these delectable & collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design 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 & her own complex feelings
- first for the school's English doctor & then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels Charlotte Bronte'sautobiographical novel the last published during her lifetime is a powerfully moving study of loneliness & isolation & 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 Bronte's life & career & argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism'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