With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. This edition includes a new introduction, which examines the novel's social and historical content, a chronology of Bronte's life and full explanatory notes.

Charlotte Bront+½ (1816-û1855) was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, one of four surviving children of a clergyman. She worked as a governess and teacher and wrote four novels, becoming one of the nineteenth century-'s greatest novelists.
Helen M. Cooper is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.