Villette

Lucy Snowe tells you almost nothing about herself, on principle. She arrives in the narrative already guarded — an orphan with no fortune and no family worth naming, who crosses to the Continent alone and talks her way into a teaching post at a girls' school in the town of Villette, in a country Brontë calls Labassecour but writes as Belgium in everything but name. What she withholds is the novel's real subject: a grief she won't name, a love she won't admit to until it is nearly too late, a jealousy of luckier women that she reports with a coldness that has unsettled readers since 1853. Brontë built an entire novel around a narrator who lies to you by omission, and dares you to notice.

It was her last completed novel, written in the two years after Anne's and Emily's deaths, in a parsonage she now had almost entirely to herself — the isolation is not incidental to the book. Villette sold well and was received as a serious literary achievement, though it has never rivalled Jane Eyre's popularity, partly because it refuses that novel's clean resolution: its famous last page describes a storm at sea and stops, deliberately, before saying who survives it. Brontë's own father wanted a happier ending. She gave him this instead.

Bibliomancer restores the 1853 text exactly as Brontë wrote it.