Villette, a Novel

Villette is the last novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1853. It is widely regarded as her most autobiographical book, and it draws on the unhappy years she spent as a teacher in Brussels.

Lucy Snowe is a young Englishwoman with neither friends nor family to fall back on. She crosses to the continent and takes a post at a girls' boarding school in the town of Villette, where she has to maintain her self-possession against pupils who test it, a headmaster who is suspicious of her, and the strangeness of living among people whose religion and manners are not her own. She has no money, no protectors and no easy way home, which makes her survival in the school a matter of nerve as much as of talent.

Two men complicate her position: the school's English doctor, and the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. The novel is a study of isolation and unrequited love, and it is told in Lucy's own voice over a long stretch of years rather than in the compressed span most novels of its period use.