Villette

When Lucy Snowe gets the job of governess at a girls' boarding school in Belgium, fortune seems to smile on her for the first time. Orphaned and destitute, shy and ungainly, for the girl that move across the Channel is a chance to leave the gray English suburbs behind and make a fresh start. But starting a new life is no small feat: having arrived in Villette -- a fictional town shaped by Charlotte Brontë after the Brussels model -- in an environment that is foreign to her, with no relatives or friends, it takes Lucy some time to overcome her initial disorientation and take charge of her own existence.
Thanks to her own strength of character, the young girl manages to earn the esteem of the authoritarian principal of the boarding school, Madame Beck, and to get on well with her cousin, Professor Paul Emanuel, a kind and brilliant man but little inclined for worldly life because of his fiery temperament. And just at the moment when the spark of an intense and tormented romance seems to have been ignited between the two, John Bretton, Lucy's charming childhood friend, bursts onto the scene.
Complete edition with an interactive table of contents.