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Villette
Villette
Nov 6, 2025 11:22 PM

Author:Charlotte Bronte,Charlotte Ritchie

Villette

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Charlotte Ritchie, best known for her roles as Oregon in Channel 4's Fresh Meat, Hannah in the BBC Three comedy Siblings, and as Barbara Gilbert in BBC drama Call the Midwife.

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette.

There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

"Listening to Call the Midwife actress Charlotte Richie read Charlotte Brontë's lesser-known novel Villette was a hugely enjoyable experience on my morning commute on trains so packed that I could not stretch out my arms to open a book."- i News

(P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Reviews

Sarah Schulman is a brilliant visionary, and this is a book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago

—— Olivia Laing

A scathing and darkly hilarious apocalypse-now

—— The Nation

Strong, nervy and challenging

—— The New York Times

Startlingly powerful

—— Dorothy Allison

A witty, angry and anguished novel

—— Publishers Weekly

The questions that the novel stages about action, complicity, and discomfort are evergreen, but they resonate with particular force for any American trying to figure out their relationship to Trump and Trumpism now

—— Peter C. Baker , The New Yorker

This is the first work of fiction I've read about AIDS that portrays the enormous activist response the epidemic has generated...Schulman's people are fighters...terrifically inspiring examples of the human spirit's passion for revival

—— David Leavitt

This emotional book won't make the walls of repression crumble, but it might make you understand this painful, hopeful moment better

—— The Village Voice

Redemption Falls is trauma incarnate, but its effect is both compassionate and luminous

—— TLS

Books of this quality demand to be reread to reveal more of their complexities and layers of meaning. Redemption Falls would reward this on the level of its rich textures of language alone

—— Sunday Herald

Ta-Nehisi Coates has emerged as an important public intellectual and perhaps America's most incisive thinker about race.

—— New York Times

Slavery, forgetting and memory are at the heart of Coates's ambitious, compelling first novel...

—— TLS

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

—— Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting

—— The Times
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