Arguably Bronte's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her experiences as a student in Brussels as well as 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 life 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 friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Bronte's strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free.

Villette (1853) by Charlotte Bront is the story of Englishwoman Lucy Snowe who ends up a teacher at a girls' pensionnat in Villette, the capital of Labassecour, a fictional French-speaking country on the continent.

Autobiographical in many ways, the novel shows stoic Lucy overcoming barriers of language, culture, complex psychological self-conflict, emotional torment, and falling in love. The character of M. Paul Emanuel is believed to have been based on Charlotte Bront's own impossible object of affection, the one and only true passion of her brief life -- Constantin Hger, the proprietor of the Brussels pensionnat where Charlotte taught.