''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, and her own complex feelings - first for
the school's English doctor and 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 and isolation, and 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 and career and
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, and was followed by
''Shirley'' (1848) and ''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). |
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