false 27003 0 0 31173 037575850X 9780375758508 348 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31173.Villette 3.73 2863 "Villette! Villette! Have you read it?" exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë's final novel appeared in 1853. "It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power."

Arguably Brontë's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette,flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new file as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her freindship with a wordly 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.

"Villette is an amazing book," observed novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. "Written before psychoanalysis came into being, Villette is nevertheless a psychoanalytic work—a psychosexual study of its heroine, Lucy Snowe. Written before the philosophy of existentialism was formulated, the novel's view of the world can only be described as existential. . . . Today it is read and discussed more intensely than Charlotte Brontë's other novels, and many critics now beleive it to be a true master-piece, a work of genius that more than fulfilled the promise of Jane Eyre." Indeed, Virginia Woolf judged Villette to be Brontë's "finest novel."

]]> 1036615 4.04 135743 7849 1169504 3.79 16732 2102 27003 3.74 2918 353 1853 48227 0679777539 9780679777533 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170351310m/48227.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170351310s/48227.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48227.Imagining_Characters_Six_Conversations_About_Women_Writers_Jane_Austen_Charlotte_Bronte_George_Eliot_Willa_Cather_Iris_Murdoch_and_Toni_Morrison 4.15 46 Mansfield Park, Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.]]> 1169504 3.79 16740 2102 27003 3.74 2918 353 1995 1809099 095371053X 9780953710539 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188645051m/1809099.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188645051s/1809099.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1809099.Dreaming_and_Thinking 0.0 0 27003 3.74 2918 353 2000