Villette

Product Description

Villette" is Charlotte Bronte'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 & 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's autobiographical 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. Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) eldest of the Bronte sisters was born in Thornton West Yorkshire. " Jane Eyre" was first published in 1847 under the pen-name Currer Bell & was followed by " Shirley" (1848) & " Vilette" (1853). In 1854 Charlotte Bronte 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)."