"Villette! Villette! Have you read it?" exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë'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 Brontë'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 life 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 friendship with a wordly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë'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 Brontë's other novels, and many critics now beleive it to be a true masterpiece, a work of genius that more than fulfilled the promise of Jane Eyre." Indeed, Virginia Woolf judged Villette to be Brontë's "finest novel."

• We started tracking this book on July 25, 2018.
• This book was £6.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 18 times in the past 1,772 days.
• The current price of this book is £4.99 last checked 12 hours ago.
• The lowest price to date was £4.99 last reached on January 15, 2023.
• This book has been £4.99 2 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £7.49 last reached on September 3, 2022.
• This book has been £7.49 2 times since we started tracking it.
• This book is currently at its lowest price since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionHistory & CriticismMovements & PeriodsVictorian
• Literature & FictionClassicsComing of Age
• Literature & FictionClassicsBritish & Irish

• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 592 Pages
• File Size: 3,733 KB