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. Charlotte Bront 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.