Villette

Description

A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Mallory Ortberg, New York Times best-selling author of Texts from Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte's final and most autobiographical novel-even more critically acclaimed than Jane Eyre during its time-is a brilliant story of repressed passion and unrequited love in the fictional French town of Villette Lucy Snowe is a young woman alone in the world after a terrible event of which she never speaks. With no home, no family, and no prospects, she sets out on her own to the small French town of Villette, where she finds work as a governess at a boarding school for girls. When a handsome doctor from her past appears in Villette, Lucy believes she may at last be free of loneliness-if her rigorous self-control doesn't conceal her true feelings. Based on Charlotte Bronte's own experiences at a boarding school in Belgium, Villette is an intense psychological portrait of its heroine, a woman who so strenuously tries to hide her passions that she cannot help but reveal them.

Charlotte was the eldest of the Bronte sisters. On the back of the enormous success of JANE EYRE Bronte was persuaded by her publisher to reveal her true identity. She would visit London occasionally and began to move in a more exalted social circle, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray and G. H. Lewes. Her book had sparked a movement in regards to feminism in literature and today is still much-loved and lauded.