Villette

Lucy Snowe, without family or fortune, leaves England for the city of Villette, a fictionalised Brussels, and takes work at Madame Beck's boarding school for girls. She teaches, watches the surveillance of the pensionnat, and forms attachments to the easy-mannered doctor John Graham Bretton and to the severe, exacting professor M. Paul Emanuel. Catholic ritual, ghostly appearances in a boarded attic, and the contrast between English reserve and continental life press on her solitude. First published in 1853, the novel is a first-person study of work, unreturned feeling, and a woman who will not be absorbed into other people's plots.

Quarter bound in black leather series binding, green linen boards. Red endleaves. Grey and black slipcase.