num_pages: 529
description: With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim.Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey — a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature."For the woman writing Villette - both the narrator, Lucy Snowe, and the actual author, Charlotte Brontë - imagination is finally victorious over human justice, and Villette, record of pain and defeat that it is, is also Lucy Snowe's own festival of bas coeur, the buried heart."From the Introduction by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
language: English
title: Villette
titlecomplete: Villette
characters: Ginevra Laura Fanshawe, M. Paul Carl David Emanuel, Madame Modeste Maria Beck, Dr. John Graham Bretton, Lucy Snowe, Paulina Mary Home, Mrs. Louisa Lucy Bretton
genres: Gothic, Literature, Novels, Victorian, 19th Century, Romance, Classics, Historical Fiction, Fiction, British Literature
ratings_count: 71002
publisher: Bantam Classics