Villette

Alone in the world and adrift in the foreign city of Villette, Lucy Snowe talks her way into a teaching post at a girls' school run by the watchful Madame Beck — and finds herself drawn first to the charming Dr. John, then to the fierce, unpredictable M. Paul Emanuel, even as a legend of a ghostly nun stalks the school's darkened attic. Widely considered Charlotte Brontë's most psychologically daring novel, Villette trades Jane Eyre's fairy-tale justice for something rawer: loneliness, repressed longing, and an ending readers still argue about more than a century later. Brontë at her most unflinching.