Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
Fiction/Classics
571 pages
first published in 1853

From Goodreads: With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls’ boarding school in the small town of Villette. There, she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings – first for the school’s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë’s autobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

I really should have read this by now. I’ve Jane Eyre (also by Brontë) for a long time, so I’m wondering why I’ve never picked up Villette. I’ve heard it praised by several BookTubers whose opinions I trust, so that plus the fact that I recently found a copy at the used bookstore should help me read this one soon.