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Villette cover art

Villette

By: Charlotte Brontë
Narrated by: Nadia May
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Summary

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.
(P)1996 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Classics Coming of Age Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

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)

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Quel heartache !

This novel brought me to a standstill ... Heartbreaking, thought provoking ..if you enjoy all things Bronte then this is a must..

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Reader - did she marry him?

Charlotte Bronte wrote a classic gothic romance that was deliberately ambiguous about having a Happy Ever After ending. Virginia Woolf apparently preferred this novel to Jane Eyre? I didn't.
Nadia May (this audiobook's performer) is a pseudonym for Wanda McCaddon. Performer was excellent. Looked her up as this was the first audiobook I've listened to from her. Her voice reminded me of Harriet Walter, and she has performed over 500 audioworks apparently. Sadly she died in Dec 2023 aged 91, having lived several lives, including having written her PhD thesis on EM Forster and been a professor. Despite the exquisite accents and drama afforded in this performance, I found the narrator's perfect RP accent distracting. I had in mind a young, middle class Victorian Yorkshire accent for the heroine, Lucy Snowe, as I imagine the author's own accent might have been. That is perhaps my bias and unfair on the performer.
Not as enjoyable as Jane Eyre, Shirley, Wuthering Heights, Tenant of Wildfell Hall or even Agnes Grey, for me. I wouldn't recommend this particular story for the general reader but glad to have been introduced to the performer.

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