Villette

"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 thanJane Eyre.There is something almost preternatural in its power." Arguably Bronte's most refined and deeply felt work,Villettedraws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator ofVillette,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 ofVillette.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. "Villetteis an amazing book," observed novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. "Written before psychoanalysis came into being,Villetteis nevertheless a psychoanalytic worka 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 ofJane Eyre."Indeed, Virginia Woolf judgedVilletteto be Bronte's "finest novel."

<br>Charlotte Brontë was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on April 21, 1816. Her father, Patrick Brontë, became curate for life of the moorland parish of Haworth, Yorkshire, in 1820, and her mother, Maria Brontë, died the following year, leaving behind five daughters and a son who were cared for in the parsonage by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1825 from tuberculosis contracted at the religious boarding school to which they (along with Charlotte and her younger sister Emily) had been sent. (All the Brontë children ultimately suffered from lung disease.)<br><br>Raised at home thereafter, Charlotte, Emily, their youngest sister, Anne, and brother, Branwell, lived in a fantasy world of their own making, drawing on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott,