Book description
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, first for the school's English doctor and then for the
dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy
experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Bront 's last and
most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving 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.
Charlotte Bront (1816-55), along with her sisters Anne and Emily,
is among the greatest 19th century English novelists and author of
Jane Eyre.
Helen M. Cooper is Professor of English at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook. She is also the author of a number of books
and articles.
