Villette
Charlotte Bronte · Literary Fiction · 594 pages
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#215 All Time
About this book
Villette is an 1853 novel by Charlotte Brontë. After an unspecified family disaster, the protagonist Lucy Snowe travels from England to the fictional French-speaking city of Villette to teach at a girls' school, where she is drawn into adventure and romance.Villette was Charlotte Brontë's fourth novel. It was preceded by the posthumously published The Professor, her first, and then Jane Eyre and Shirley. Themes Villette is noted not so much for its plot as for its acute tracing of Lucy's psychology.The novel is sometimes celebrated as an exploration of gender roles and repression. In The Madwoman in the Attic, critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that the character of Lucy Snowe is based in part on William Wordsworth's Lucy poems. Gilbert and Gubar emphasise the idea of feminine re-writing. Some critics have explored the issues of Lucy's psychological state in terms of what they call "patriarchal constructs" which form her cultural context. Villette also explores isolatio
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