Book description
'That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the
conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind,
bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the trial God had
appointed me was gaining its climax, and must now be turned by my
own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were'
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.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Charlotte Bront (1816-55) was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, one of
an extraordinary group of siblings who spent their time immersed in
reading and writing and between them went on to change the nature of
English fiction. Publishing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte
was a great friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote her biography, as
well as William Makepeace Thackeray and George Henry Lewes.
Bront 's novels Jane Eyre and Shirley are also
published in the Penguin English Library.
