Villette (Clothbound Hardback Edition)

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's autobiographical 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.