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Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman with no family, money or prospects, crosses the Channel alone and arrives at night in Villette, capital of the imaginary…
Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman with no family, money or prospects, crosses the Channel alone and arrives at night in Villette, capital of the imaginary kingdom of Labassecour, where she finds work at Madame Beck's school for girls. There, watched by the spying headmistress, she falls quietly in love with a handsome English doctor, suffers a loneliness so deep that she breaks down, and slowly comes to know the fiery, irritable teacher Monsieur Paul Emanuel.
Context and significance
Charlotte Brontë based the novel on her own years at a school in Brussels, where she fell unhappily in love with her married teacher, Constantin Héger. Published in 1853, it is darker and more inward than Jane Eyre, and George Eliot called it 'a still more wonderful book'. Lucy, who hides her feelings even from the reader, is one of the most modern narrators of the Victorian age. See her life.
About the author
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote tiny books about them. Her two elder sisters died after a harsh boarding school, the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.
After working as a teacher and governess and studying in Brussels, she published poems with her sisters under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and in 1847 Jane Eyre made her famous. She outlived all her siblings, married in 1854 and died the following year. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights.