Villette - Softcover

Charlotte Brontė

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551114615 ISBN 13: 9781551114613

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2005

Synopsis

Charlotte Brontė’s contemporary George Eliot wrote of Villette, “There is something almost preternatural in its power.” The deceptive stillness and security of a girls’ school provide the setting for this 1853 novel, Brontė’s last. Modelled on Brontė’s own experiences as a student and teacher in Brussels, Villette is the sombre but engrossing story of Lucy Snowe, an unmarried Englishwoman making her way in a culture deeply foreign to her. The heroine’s relationships with the fiery professor M. Paul, the cool Englishman Dr. John, and the school’s powerful headmistress, Madame Beck, are described in her compelling and enigmatic first-person narration.

This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction by Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky. The many contextual documents include contemporary writings on surveillance and espionage, anti-Catholicism, and working women, as well as letters describing Brontė’s own time in Brussels.

About this title

From the Publisher:

With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Bronte reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Bronte'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 coquetter. 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.

About the Author:

Kate Lawson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. She is the co-author with Lynn Shakinovsky of The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature (State University of New York Press, 2002).

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1551114615
• ISBN 13: 9781551114613
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 647
• Editor: Kate Lawson