Villette

With no family and almost no money, Lucy Snowe sails alone to the foreign city of Villette and finds work at Madame Beck's school — a place of soft slippers and softer surveillance, where letters are read and drawers are searched and the lonely English Protestant is watched most of all. There she nurses a hopeless half-love for a handsome young doctor, and there she slowly, warily comes to understand the small, fiery, jealous schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel.

Drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own years as a teacher in Brussels, Villette takes seriously a life the world would call unimportant and insists that its interior is as vast as any. Its real drama is the drama of one mind under pressure: Lucy's loneliness in the empty school, her shame and envy and sudden joy, her iron command over feelings she dares not show.

What makes the book startlingly modern is Lucy herself, a narrator who will not tell us everything — who conceals what she knows, lets us misread, and keeps the reader at arm's length as she keeps everyone else. The famously open ending, in which she describes a great storm at sea and then refuses to say who survives it, is the last and most characteristic of her acts of reticence.

George Eliot called it “a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre,” and Virginia Woolf thought it Charlotte Brontë's finest novel. A study of solitude, work, surveillance, and guarded love, Villette gave English fiction a new kind of heroine — difficult, secretive, unconsoled — and has only grown in stature since.