Villette (Modern Library) (Modern Library Torchbearers) - Softcover

Charlotte Bronte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037575850X ISBN 13: 9780375758508

Publisher: Modern Library Inc, 2001

Synopsis

'I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.' George Eliot Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and be loved. Based in part on Charlotte Brontė's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is a cogent and dramatic exploration of a woman's response to the challenge of a constricting social environment. Its deployment of imagery comparable in power to that of Emily Brontė's Wuthering Heights, and its use of comedyDSironic or exuberantDSin the service of an ultimately sombre vision, make Villette especially appealing to the modern reader.

About this title

Review:

" Bronte ' s finest novel."
--Virginia Woolf

Villette is an amazing bookWritten 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 Brontė'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 of Jane Eyre Indeed, Virginia Woolf judged Villette to be Brontė's finest novel --novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

About the Author:

Charlotte Brontė was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on April 21, 1816. Her father, Patrick Brontė, became curate for life of the moorland parish of Haworth, Yorkshire, in 1820, and her mother, Maria Brontė, 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 Brontė children ultimately suffered from lung disease.) 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, Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and gothic fiction, and writing elaborate poetic and dramatic cycles involving the histories of imaginary countries. Charlotte's early writings revolved around the kingdom of Angria, about which she wrote melodramatic tales of passion and revenge. She spent a year studying at Miss Wooler's school in Roe Head (later relocated to Dewsbury Moor), and went back there to teach from 1835 to 1838; subsequently she worked as a governess. With Emily, Charlotte traveled in 1842 to study languages at a boarding school in Brussels; her close emotional attachment to her instructor, M. Heger, a married man, would later figure in her fiction. Charlotte and Emily went home after a year because of their aunt's death; Charlotte subsequently returned to Brussels for a year of teaching, 1843 to 1844. A joint collection of poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published pseudonymously as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in 1846. The three sisters had in the meantime each written a novel, of which Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were accepted in 1847 for publication the following year. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, based on her experiences in Brussels, was rejected by a series of publishers (it finally appeared posthumously in 1857). Jane Eyre was published under Charlotte's pseudonym, Currer Bell, in 1847 and achieved commercial and critical success; it had gone through four editions by the time of Charlotte's death. Jane Eyre won high praises; William Makepeace Thackeray (who later became a friend) declared himself exceedingly moved and pleased and George Henry Lewes applauded its deep significant realityit was also criticized by some for the rebelliousness of its heroine and for what the Quarterly Review called coarseness of language and laxity of tone During this period the Brontės underwent repeated tragedies. Branwell, despite his early promise, had been ravaged by the effects of drink and drugs, and when he found work as a tutor in the same household where Anne was a governess, his involvement with his employer's wife led to his dismissal; he died in September of 1848, followed three months later by Emily and the following year by Anne. Charlotte, the sole survivor, published two more novels, Shirley (1849), a novel of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic period, and Villette (1853), a further fictional exploration of her Brussels experiences. In 1850 she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a close friendship; Gaskell later wrote the classic biography of her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontė (1857). Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854, and died on March 31, 1855

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 037575850X
• ISBN 13: 9780375758508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 656