Villette - Softcover

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.

""Villette! "Villette! Have you read it?" exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Bronte's final novel appeared in 1853. "It is a still more wonderful book than "Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power."
Arguably Bronte's most refined and deeply felt work, "Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of "Villette, flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new file 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 freindship with a wordly 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.
""Villette is an amazing book," observed novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. "Written before psychoanalysis came into being, "Villette is nevertheless a psychoanalytic work--a psychosexual study of its heroine, Lucy Snowe. Written before the philosophy of existentialism was formulated, the novel's view of the world can only be described as existential. . . . Today it is read and discussed more intensely than Charlotte Bronte's other novels, and many critics now beleive it to be a true master-piece, a work of genius that more than fulfilled the promise of "Jane Eyre." Indeed, Virginia Woolf judged "Villette to be Bronte's "finest novel."