Villette - Softcover

Bronte, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185381136X ISBN 13: 9781853811364

Publisher: Virago, 1990

Synopsis

Inspired, as in "The Professor", by the time she spent in Brussels, Charlotte Bronte describes loneliness and depression with unprecedented truthfulness. Elements of the supernatural add power to this novel.

About this title

Review:

This edition of Villette gives readers the understanding necessary to fully enter what Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky call its 'demanding, sometimes punishing narrative mode.' Their introduction justifies and celebrates the gaps and evasions in the text as the 'heretic narrative' of a protagonist who does not always understand herself. The useful appendices--notably on women and love, women and work, and anti-Catholicism--provide the historical material to contextualise the story. The edition admirably demonstrates that this paradoxical narrative--a domestic novel about work, a love story about repression, and a realist text that embraces the supernatural--repays and rewards close examination. -- Maggie Berg, Queen's University Kate Lawson's edition of Villette is expansive and precise, like the novel it contextualizes and introduces so well. Providing a rich analysis of the complex themes of the novel, the introduction at once acknowledges and limns the text's resistance to codification and carefully suggests the beautiful patterns in its seeming inconsistencies. The primary materials provide further context for the novel, particularly in regards to the 'Woman Question.' Arranged to be in dialogue with each other about this pivotal topic, these materials provide the background necessary for understanding the novel's involvement with those discussions. --Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico

From the Back Cover:

Arguably Bronte's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her experiences as a student in Brussels as well as 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 worldly 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 185381136X
• ISBN 13: 9781853811364
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 481