Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

After a family disaster, Lucy Snowe travels from her native England to the French-speaking city of Villette to teach at a girls' school. There, Lucy becomes progressively closer to the irascible, autocratic, and male chauvinist professor, M. Paul Emanuel. However, a group of conspiring antagonists work to keep the two apart, on the grounds that a union between a catholic and a protestant is impossible.

Villette is noted for its acute tracing of Lucy's psychology. The novel, in a gothic setting, simultaneously explores themes of isolation, doubling, displacement and subversion, and each of their impacts upon the protagonist's psyche. Villette is sometimes celebrated as an exploration of gender roles and repression. Villette also explores isolation and cross-cultural conflict in Lucy's attempts to master the French language, as well as conflicts between her English Protestantism and Catholicism.

This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

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After a family disaster, Lucy Snowe travels to the city of Villette to teach at a girls' school. There, Lucy becomes progressively closer to the irascible and autocratic M. Paul Emanuel. However, a group of conspiring antagonists work to keep the two apart, on the grounds that a union between a catholic and a protestant is impossible.

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

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**In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement.** 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, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.