With neither friends nor family Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls's boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils a headmistress who spies on her staff and her own complex feelings - first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Villette Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving look at isolation and the pain of unrequited love narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.