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Villette

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Villette

By: Charlotte Brontë
Narrated by: Andrea Giordani
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About this listen

Villette (1853) was Charlotte Brontë's third novel and the last published during her lifetime. After an unspecified family catastrophe, the main character, Lucy Snowe, travels to Belgium to teach in a boarding school in the fictional town of Villette. She falls in love with a man she cannot marry, which triggers a nervous breakdown. Ultimately, a new, strong Lucy emerges who becomes the owner and head of her own school.

Parts of the novel's dialogue is in French. Its main themes include isolation, how to deal with it, and the internal conflict brought about by the social repression of individual desire. Villette saw Brontë's return to writing from a first-person perspective, the technique she had applied so well in Jane Eyre.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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With a different narrator Villette would have been a better audible experience. Such dreadful narration - many English words mispronounced because Andrea cannot pronounce the letter O in more than one way. The French is mangled as well. I had plenty of sympathy for the main character despite the distractions. The plot is bolstered up by 'I had recognised him but not told the reader', as an afterthought.

Oddly pronounced

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