Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series designed by the award-winning
Coralie Bickford-Smith these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality
colourful tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. With neither friends nor family
Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small
town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly
pupils the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck and her own complex feelings - first for the
school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own
deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels Charlotte Brontë'sautobiographical novel
the last published during her lifetime is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and
isolation and the pain of unrequited love narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an
independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. Helen M. Cooper's new introduction
places the novel in the context of Brontë's life and career and argues for the importance of
the novel as an exploration of imperialism. 'I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder
about me for I have been reading Villette ' George Eliot 'Her finest novel' Virginia Woolf
