Villette Reading Order

Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë is her most ambitious novel and the one most often identified by critics as her finest — a study of psychological intensity, suppressed passion, and the specific loneliness of an educated woman without social connections, told in the first person by Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman who teaches at a Belgian boarding school (the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, where Charlotte herself taught) and falls in love with the school's director, M. Paul Emanuel. The novel is remarkable for its psychological precision (the famous chapter 'The Long Vacation,' in which Lucy breaks down completely while left alone at the school, is one of the finest accounts of mental breakdown in Victorian fiction) and for its structural innovations — Lucy is an unreliable narrator who deliberately withholds information from the reader, who discovers midway through the novel that Lucy has been concealing facts we were told she doesn't know. The novel's ending — in which M. Paul's fate is left ambiguous — was criticized by contemporary readers who wanted a clear happy ending and is now recognized as one of the most artistically honest endings in the Victorian novel.