Villette
Lucy Snowe, penniless and unattractive, goes to teach in a Belgian boarding school and narrates her own life with a reserve that becomes a kind of defiance. Charlotte Brontë based the novel on her time in Brussels, and it is her most autobiographical book.
It is stranger than Jane Eyre: the plot relies on coincidence, there is a ghostly nun, and the narrator openly refuses to tell the reader everything. The love story is slow and ambiguous, and the ending is notoriously withheld. Readers who want another Jane Eyre will be disappointed; readers who want a more difficult book will not.
Public-domain status
First published in 1853. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, so this work has been free to republish there since 1926.
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