Villette (Summarized Edition)

Set in the francophone capital of Labassecour, Villette follows the reticent Englishwoman Lucy Snowe as she finds precarious employment at Madame Beck's pensionnat, negotiates surveillance and secrecy, and develops fraught attachments to Dr. John and the exacting M. Paul Emanuel. Brontë's taut first-person voice withholds as much as it reveals, interweaving Gothic apparitions—the spectral nun—with...