Audiobook · read by volunteers
Villette
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)
Read by Chip, Jim Mowatt, Heather Barnett, Tae Jensen, Ophelia Darcy, Kristin LeMoine, Michelle Crandall, Tora, Susan Denney, Kymm Zuckert · 42 chapters · 20 h 25
About the book
After a tragedy in her family, Lucy Snow leaves England for a French-speaking city and takes a post at a girls’ boarding school. She has no money and no protector, and she is reserved to the point of invisibility. But she watches everything. A charming young doctor, a strict and curious schoolmaster, a series of odd happenings at night and a long, hard season of loneliness all leave their mark.
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is the last novel she published in her lifetime and, in the opinion of many readers, her most daring. It is a study of solitude, desire and self-command, told in a voice that is guarded, ironic and fiercely honest. In forty-two chapters and more than twenty hours, this recording invites you into a heroine’s inner world, where small events carry great weight and feeling runs deep beneath a composed surface.
Introduction
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) is best known for Jane Eyre, published in 1847, but she wrote three other novels, and Villette, which appeared in 1853, was the last to be completed in her lifetime. It is based partly on her own time in Brussels, where she had studied and taught in a school run by a Belgian couple, and where she is thought to have known loneliness and unreturned feeling.
The novel follows Lucy Snow, who leaves England after a family loss and ends up as a teacher in the fictional city of Villette, a thinly disguised Brussels. Lucy narrates her own story, but she is a reticent narrator, one who does not always tell us everything, and part of the novel’s fascination lies in the gap between what she says and what she feels. The book deals with isolation, the pressures on a woman without family or fortune, and the clash between English and Continental customs, including religious ones. Some of the Protestant narrator’s comments on Catholicism reflect the prejudices of the time.
Critics have often praised Villette for its psychological depth. It is a less obviously romantic book than Jane Eyre, and its ending has been much discussed. It is also a slow burn, and readers who expect the fast pace of her earlier novel may need a little patience.
The recording has 42 sections and lasts about twenty hours and twenty minutes. It is read by LibriVox volunteers. Why listen today? Because Lucy Snow is one of the most subtle narrators in Victorian fiction, and because the book offers a picture of a woman making a life on her own terms. It rewards attention.
Public domain
Charlotte Brontë died in 1855: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text