"May convincingly portrays the many moods and complex character of Charlotte Brontë's heroine....Her many voices, with subtle timing, sweep us at a quick clip through a narrative of psychological insight and vividly rendered places, people and landscapes."--AudioFile

"Villette! Villette! Have you read it? It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.

There is something almost preternatural in its power."--George Eliot

"Brontë's finest novel."--Virginia Woolf

Arguably Brontë's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees her independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Lucy flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the cosmopolitan capital of Villette. But her struggle for independence is soon overshadowed by her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë's strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free.