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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 Bront‰´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 Bront‰´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

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I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette - there is something preternatural about its power George Eliot

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Bront‰, Charlotte
Charlotte Bront‰ was born in Yorkshire in 1816. As a child, she was sent to boarding school, where two of her sisters died; she was subsequently educated at home with her younger siblings, Emily, Branwell and Anne. As an adult, Charlotte worked as a governess and taught in a school in Brussels. Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under the pen-name Currer Bell, and was followed by Shirley (1848), Villette (1853) and The Professor (posthumously published in 1857). In 1854 Charlotte married her father´s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died in March of the following year.

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