Villette, Charlotte Bronte
Villette, Charlotte Bronte
107 Rating(s)
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Villette

Author: Charlotte Brontë

Narrator: Karen Cass

Unabridged: 19 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2005

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls's boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, a headmistress who spies on her staff, and her own complex feelings – first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Villette, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel, is a powerfully moving look at isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

About Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England, the third child of the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell Bronte. In 1820 the family moved to neighboring Haworth, where Reverend Bronte was offered a lifetime curacy. The following year, Mrs. Bronte died of cancer, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to help raise the six children. The four eldest sisters-Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth-attended Cowan Bridge School until Maria and Elizabeth contracted what was probably tuberculosis and died within months of each other, at which point Charlotte and Emily returned home. The four remaining siblings-Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne-played on the Yorkshire moors and dreamed up fanciful, fabled worlds, creating a constant stream of tales, such as the Young Men plays and Our Fellows.

Reverend Bronte kept his children abreast of current events; among these were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in which the Duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte's awareness of politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings' saga The Islanders, about an imaginary world peopled with the Bronte children's real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as Charlotte's chosen character.

In 1831 and 1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.

In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year Charlotte finished her first novel, The Professor, but it was not accepted for publication.

However, she then began work on Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety in the core of the story-the relationship between a middle-aged man and the young, naive governess who works for him-most reviewers praised the novel, helping to ensure its popularity.

Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Bronte in 1848 and Anne in 1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary circles. In 1850, she met the noted British writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request of Reverend Bronte, later became her biographer. Charlotte's novel Villette was published in 1853.

In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who worked with her father. Less than a year later, however, she fell seriously ill, perhaps with tuberculosis, and she died on March 31, 1855. At the time of her death, Charlotte Bronte was a celebrated author. The 1857 publication of her first novel, The Professor, and of Gaskell's biography of her life only heightened her renown.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on December 29, 2022

welcome to...VILLETTEMBER! that would be a better pun for september but who cares, big news, THIS MONTH HAS TWO PROJECT LONG CLASSIC INSTALLMENTS! i missed this project so much, and it's been so long, and also i am so behind on my reading challenge and tired of reading tiny books and graphic novels to......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on March 21, 2014

This book is better than Jane Eyre, guys. This is where Charlotte Bronte shows her real brilliance. I hovered between giving this two stars and four for about half the book because I really wasn't sure what was going on beneath the surface. But then I figured out that I was stupid and didn't see hal......more

Goodreads review by William2 on August 25, 2019

With this, I think, fourth reading, the book reconstitutes itself utterly fresh yet familiar. I still find it surprising in ways I could not have appreciated earlier, as if another layer of the narrative complexity were revealing itself. It seems logical to reread books an author has put through mul......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on January 03, 2018

I finished this last night and I'm STILL ANGRY. WHAT THE HELL, CHARLOTTE? I mean, seriously. I would also like to sit down with the person who wrote the introduction and talked about how Villette is so much better than Jane Eyre. I would like to speak to this person about their drug habit, and how it'......more

Goodreads review by Henry on April 03, 2024

Lucy Snowe a plain -looking quiet 23-year- old intelligent woman in need of money and help, ( stating it mildly) she has no family left in England in an era before Victoria came to the throne, her godmother Mrs. Bretton who lived in a small town ironically named Bretton, has moved to colossal London......more