PENGUIN CLASSICS CLOTHBOUND : VILLETTE HC – CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Part of Penguin s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 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, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings – first for the school s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Bronte sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. Helen M. Cooper s new introduction places the novel in the context of Bronte s life and career and argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism. I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette George Eliot Her finest novel Virginia Woolf