Villette

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Department of English, Canterbury Christ Church University College. Arguably Bronte’s most refined and deeply felt work, ‘Villette’ draws on her experiences as a teacher in Brussels, as well as her profound loneliness following the deaths of her siblings. It is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of ‘Villette’, flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy’s struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Bronte’s strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free. Rising above the frustrations of confinement within a rigid social order, it is the story of a woman’s right to love and be loved. AUTHOR Charlotte Bronte(1816-1855) was oldest of the three Bronte sisters to achieve fame. Her first published novel ‘Jane Eyre’ remains her most popular work, but her subsequent books, ‘Shirley’, ‘Villette’ and the posthumously-published ‘The Professor’ are all highly rated.