Charlotte Bronte’s final and most autobiographical novel-even more critically acclaimed than Jane Eyre during its time-is a brilliant story of repressed passion and unrequited love in the fictional French town of Villette

Lucy Snowe is a young woman alone in the world after a terrible event of which she never speaks. With no home, no family, and no prospects, she sets out on her own to the small French town of Villette, where she finds work as a governess at a boarding school for girls. When a handsome doctor from her past appears in Villette, Lucy believes she may at last be free of loneliness-if her rigorous self-control doesn’t conceal her true feelings.

Based on Charlotte Bronte’s own experiences at a boarding school in Belgium, Villette is an intense psychological portrait of its heroine, a woman who so strenuously tries to hide her passions that she cannot help but reveal them.