Villette

After an unspecified family disaster leaves her without home or income, Lucy Snowe travels alone from England to the fictional Continental city of Villette to teach at Madame Beck's girls' school. Reserved and watchful, Lucy observes rather than confides, and the novel follows her guarded attachments: a warm but ultimately one-sided feeling for Dr. John Graham Bretton, and a combative, gradually deepening friendship with the school's irascible literature teacher, M. Paul Emanuel.

Charlotte Brontë draws on her own time teaching abroad in Brussels for the novel's account of isolation, surveillance, and unreturned affection, and for Lucy's eventual breakdown under the weight of loneliness. M. Paul's departure for the West Indies, and the ambiguous fate Brontë leaves him, gives the 1853 novel one of the most debated endings in Victorian fiction.