Villette
by Charlotte Bronte & Helen M. Cooper (editor & Introduction By & Notes by)
AUCK IN STOCK
WGTN IN STOCK
672
Jun 2004
Paperback
Penguin Canada
9780140434798
There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.
A haunting Victorian classic of female solitude, self-negation, and gothic proto-feminist sentiment. Woefully underrated in spite of being, imo, the best Charlotte Bronte novel – Jane Eyre fans pls don’t kill me. If you wish Jane Eyre was set in fake-Belgium, featured a ghost nun, and that its heroine’s romantic dissatisfaction were even more protracted, Villette might be for you. Recommended to solemn and self-determined ladies, to femcels, to anyone whose favourite Austen novel is Mansfield Park, and to fans of a spooky school setting. Textually pretty straight but sapphics who struggle to know whether they want to be or be with the beautiful women they admire will probably relate.
Amelia, Unity Books wellington
