Villette

What it is

Villette is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 1853 under her pen name Currer Bell. It was her third and last novel published in her lifetime, and follows Lucy Snowe, who travels to teach at a girls' school in a fictional continental town modelled on Brussels.

Why it matters

The novel reworks Brontë's own time teaching in Brussels in the 1840s, where she fell in love with a married teacher, M. Heger, who is widely believed to have inspired the novel's M. Paul Emanuel. Villette shows how Brontë transformed difficult personal experience into fiction, and it explores themes of loneliness, religion and independence for women.

Look closer

• Why might an author disguise real experiences and people inside a work of fiction rather than writing directly about them?
• What does the title page tell you about how the novel was marketed, using the same pen name as Jane Eyre?
• What might the choice of a first-person narrator add or hide compared to other ways of telling a story?