Villette by Charlotte Brontë: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Villette
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The opening of Chapter 1
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace—Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.
When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide—so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement—these things pleased me well.
One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman.
The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which the narrator describes her godmother’s house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton, the visits she paid there twice a year as a girl, and the widowed Mrs. Bretton and her son.
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The town of Bretton, the packet-boat crossing and the city of Villette in Labassecour, in the 1840s.
Forty-two chapters grouped into twelve movements
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Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #9182 · Standard Ebooks
Villette was published in 1853, and it is told by Lucy Snowe, an Englishwoman with no family, no money and no prospects, who talks her way into a teaching post at a girls’ school in the town of Villette, in the kingdom of Labassecour. The school belongs to Madame Beck, whose kindness is administered with keys, spies and wax impressions. Lucy teaches English, loves an irritable professor of literature, watches a beautiful pupil torment a young English doctor, and keeps meeting a figure in black and white on the stairs. The book is a study in endurance.
The novel’s method is retrospective and close. The narrator speaks to the reader, holds back what she will not say, and gives the last chapter in a deliberate half-light that never says what happened. Its scenes are few and long, a schoolroom, a gallery, a theatre, a garden alley, and its weather does much of the work. Wikipedia’s entry on Villette summarises the plot and the questions the ending leaves open. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #9182 and Standard Ebooks.
Villette by Charlotte Brontë: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page offers a summary and analysis of Villette, with the novel’s forty-two chapters laid out in twelve movements, its characters described, and the three years of its final section set beside the school years that come before them. Charlotte Brontë published the book in 1853, and it is an enclosed, wintry novel. Its narrator is a teacher rather than a governess; its love story is conducted in a language the heroine is still learning; and its real subject is the management of a proud and hungry mind in a house where every door has a key and every key has an owner. Very little in the plot is explained twice.
The book begins at Bretton, with a child called Paulina Home left for a few months with the narrator’s godmother while her father travels. Eight years pass, a fortune is lost, and Lucy Snowe, twenty-three and with fifteen pounds, becomes the companion of Miss Marchmont, an invalid who dies on the night she promises to do something for her. Lucy takes a packet boat to the Continent, arrives after dark in Villette with her trunk left behind at Boue-Marine, and finds a brass plate that reads Pensionnat de Demoiselles, Madame Beck. She is examined, approved, fed and engaged in a single night, and the next morning she is the English teacher of a division of sixty pupils she cannot control.
The school is a small state. Madame Beck searches Lucy’s drawers, reads her memorandum-book, and takes impressions of her keys; the pupils lie lightly and are surprised when the new teacher tells them that lying is worse than missing mass. Ginevra Fanshawe, pretty and unkind, is courted by a mysterious Isidore who sends jewels and bouquets and turns out to be Dr. John, the young English surgeon who set little Fifine’s broken arm, and who is in fact Lucy’s own Graham Bretton, the son of her godmother. Behind all of it stands the legend of the nun, a girl said to have been buried alive for breaking her vow, whose black skirt and white veil keep appearing on the stairs.
The second half shifts its weight to M. Paul Emanuel, the professor of literature, a small dark irritable man in spectacles who examines everything except English, spies on Lucy from a hired window with a light in it, lectures her for coquetry and worldly dress, and finally declares himself in the Faubourg Clotilde with a written plan for a school. Père Silas and Madame Walravens explain, in an old house across the Basse-Ville, why he has never married: a girl called Justine Marie died in a convent, and he has supported her ruined family, the priest and an ancient servant ever since, on three-quarters of his income.
The last chapter gives three years of separation, a school that prospers, a hundred pounds from the heir of Miss Marchmont, letters that arrive by every vessel, and then a storm that lasts seven days and leaves the Atlantic strewn with wrecks. The narrator stops there and tells the reader to pause; she does not say what happened to the ship. This edition follows the Standard Ebooks text and keeps the novel’s own chapter divisions. The book can be read beside Jane Eyre, the earlier novel of a governess with no money and a strong will, beside Wuthering Heights, published in the same year as Jane Eyre and just as unreconciled, and beside The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whose heroine also leaves a house she cannot bear. The full text is at Project Gutenberg and at Standard Ebooks.
Historical Context
Labassecour is a kingdom the reader is asked to accept on its own terms: a French-speaking Catholic country with a capital, a court, a college called the Athénée, a municipality under a bourgmestre, and a school system that divides girls into boarders and day pupils, the pensionnat and the externat. Villette itself is built in two halves, the old Basse-Ville of narrow streets, brokers and churches, and the newer Haute-Ville of boulevards and shops, and Lucy crosses between them on foot. The novel takes her from the Rue Fossette, where the house was once a convent and part of it still looks like one, to La Terrasse outside the Porte de Crécy, to the Hôtel Crécy, and at last to a little street of new houses called the Faubourg Clotilde.
The religious quarrel is the novel’s second landscape. Lucy is the only Protestant in a Catholic school, and the book never lets her forget it: a priest hears her confession in an old church and tells her she was made for his faith, a tract is left in her desk, a spiritual director is appointed, and the procession of church and army passes under a balcony while she watches. M. Paul is a Catholic of the pious, impoverished kind, taught by Jesuits and bound by a vow; Ginevra and the pupils take their religion lightly and lie about it; Madame Beck takes hers as she takes everything, as a matter of management. The nun in the attic belongs to the same argument, a legend of a girl walled up for a broken vow, told to frighten children and believed by nobody who has to sweep the stairs.
The novel is also a book about work. Its heroine has no inheritance and no family to fall back on, and it counts her money: fifteen pounds when she leaves England, a salary she never names, a refusal of three times that salary to be a rich man’s daughter’s companion, a bead guard made at dawn, a hundred pounds that arrives by post and is at once turned into a lease on the next house. The school is a business with subscriptions, prizes and a prospectus, and the teachers are watched as closely as the pupils. When Lucy finally sets up for herself, the book prints her advertisement, and the address on it is the last piece of property she owns.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Lucy Snowe: The narrator: plain, proud, twenty-three when she leaves England, with no family and fifteen pounds. She is a companion, then an English teacher, then the directress of her own school. She watches rather than confides, keeps her griefs in a glass jar under a pear-tree, and tells the reader less than she knows. Her creed is Protestant, her temper is dry, and her endurance is the engine of the book.
- M. Paul Emanuel: Professor of literature at Madame Beck’s school and her cousin: small, dark, spare, spectacled, tyrannical in class and tender out of it. He examines everything but English, keeps a lit window opposite Lucy’s, scolds her for coquetry and worldly dress, and is given a bead watchguard she has worked for him. He is bound by an old grief and a vow, supports three dependants on his income, and sails for the West Indies for three years.
- Dr. John: Graham Bretton, the godmother’s son, now a physician in Villette, called Dr. John by the Beck children after he sets Fifine’s arm. Blue-eyed, auburn-haired, generous and a little vain, he loves Ginevra Fanshawe until he sees her laugh at his mother, then loves Paulina Home, whom he marries. He is the book’s golden man and the one Lucy cannot have.
- Ginevra Fanshawe: A pupil at the pensionnat: seventeen, beautiful, selfish, idle and amusing, with five sisters, three brothers and a father on half-pay. She invents a suitor called Isidore, accepts his jewels, despises him as bourgeois, and prefers Colonel Alfred de Hamal, whom she finally marries after an elopement contrived through the garden wall. She is the book’s comedy and its warning.
- Madame Beck: The directress: forty, stout, motherly in appearance, auburn-haired, with three children and a school of more than a hundred pupils. Her system is surveillance, her instruments are keys, spyholes, wax impressions and a smile. She is not a villain; she is a manager, and the book is careful to show her courage in a crisis and her meanness in a triumph. She tells Lucy she must not marry Paul.
- Paulina Mary Home: The child left at Bretton in the first chapters, small, neat, self-possessed, praying for her father. She returns as the Countess de Bassompierre, seventeen, delicate and firm, and quietly takes Graham Bretton from Ginevra without appearing to compete. Her father calls her his only pearl; her marriage is the one unclouded happiness in the novel.
Core Literary Themes
- Surveillance and the locked door: The school is built as a machine for watching: Madame Beck searches a new teacher’s clothes on her first night, reads her memorandum-book, takes wax impressions of her keys and keeps a spyhole onto the class. M. Paul rents a room with a lit window and a key to the shed door so that he can watch the garden. Lucy learns the system and turns it on herself, hiding in the oratory and burying her letters. The novel’s Gothic furniture, the garret, the alley, the nun, all serve this theme: to be seen is the ordinary condition of life, and to see without being seen is the only power a poor woman has. The plot turns on secrets nobody can keep, a casket read by the wrong person, letters stolen and returned, a wall that proves to have a skylight.
- Protestantism and Rome: Lucy is a Protestant in a Catholic country, and the novel tests her creed against a more decorative one. Père Silas hears her confession, urges her to visit his house in the Rue des Mages, and later has a tract left in her desk; a course of reading is prescribed and a director appointed. She answers with a defence of private judgement, and the two of them reach a truce rather than a conversion. The novel makes Rome neither villain nor ornament: the priest is kind, the old women are devout, the ritual is beautiful, and M. Paul’s Catholicism is the tenderest religion in the book, a boy taught by Jesuits who keeps a vow he made at twenty and gives away most of his income.
- The ghost that is a man: The nun is introduced as a legend and maintained as a threat: a girl buried alive under the pear-tree for a sin against her vow, seen in the attic, at the foot of a bed, in the alley at dusk. Lucy sees her three times, and each sighting is followed by a loss, a letter that vanishes, a buried jar, a burnt-out candle. The reader is invited to explain her as an apparition of guilt, and the novel allows that reading until the last moment. Then Ginevra’s letter explains everything: the black skirt and white veil were a colonel in disguise, climbing the wall and coming through the garret skylight. The supernatural is withdrawn, and a man in a house of girls is worse than a ghost.
- Love, renunciation and the withheld ending: Villette is a love story in which the heroine is mostly a spectator. She loves Graham Bretton in silence while he loves Ginevra, and then while he loves Paulina; she is loved by M. Paul, who is bound by a vow and a dead girl’s family and who leaves for three years without promising anything. The book’s emotional weather is made of these refusals. Lucy’s declaration, when it comes, is a permission rather than a proposal: she tells him she has loved him, and he tells her to take his love. The last chapter refuses the ending it has earned, giving the three years, the school, the letters and then a storm, and telling the reader to let sunny imaginations hope.
- Work, money and independence: The novel is exact about money because its heroine has none. Fifteen pounds take Lucy to London; her wages are paid by a miser’s heir; she refuses three times her salary rather than live as a companion in a great house; she counts the cost of a pink dress she did not buy. Her ambition is not marriage but a school of her own, and the book takes it seriously enough to print the prospectus, the address, the landlord’s name and the promised pupils. When the hundred pounds arrives it is capital, not romance: the adjoining house is taken, the externat becomes a pensionnat, and the business grows. Independence here is a lease, and it is kept for a man’s return.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Villette?
The text here is complete, in the novel’s own forty-two chapters, and the summaries below follow that order so that a reader can put the book down after any chapter and pick it up again knowing what has happened. The guide names the places and the institutions as the novel names them, the Rue Fossette, the Athénée, the Faubourg Clotilde, so that the movements are not just a list of numbers. The French, the schoolroom terms and the religious vocabulary are left as Brontë wrote them.
This edition follows the Standard Ebooks text; the chapter division, the punctuation and the byline are that edition’s. Nothing has been modernised or cut. If you want the source itself, or want to compare a passage, the same text is at Project Gutenberg #9182. The publication details at the top of the page come from that edition too, so that the page and the file agree.
Everything on the page is free: the EPUB, the AZW3 and the KEPUB, with no account, no email and no sample chapter. The files are the whole novel, and the chapter guide exists because Villette is long, its narrator withholds, and a reader who breaks off in the middle of the school year can lose the thread of who is watching whom. There is no paywall and no newsletter at the end of the download.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text this page follows; the chapter numbers and the byline are that edition’s.
- Complete text in forty-two chapters All forty-two chapters in the novel’s own order, with no chapter abridged, no scene cut and the French left untranslated.
- Chapter summaries in reading order Twelve grouped summaries from the house at Bretton to the storm in the last chapter, each keyed to the numbered chapters it covers.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the chapter breaks and the school’s French intact.
- Charlotte Brontë’s novel of a governess, a locked attic and a marriage that has to be earned twice, the book Villette answers from the other side of the Channel. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Emily Brontë’s novel of two houses, a moor and a love that refuses every settlement. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Anne Brontë’s novel of a woman who leaves a violent husband and earns her living by her brush, the plainest of the three books about a woman’s work. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Villette has forty-two chapters and no divisions beyond them; the twelve groups below are ours, added for navigation, and each label describes the movement it covers. The summaries follow the chapters in order and stop at the end of the range they cover, so the page can be read beside the novel without giving away the next movement. The novel’s own numbering is used throughout, and places, books and forms of address are spelled as the Standard Ebooks text spells them.
- Chapters 1–4 — Bretton and the child Paulina: Lucy Snowe remembers her godmother’s house at Bretton and the winter when Paulina Home, a small neat child, was left there while her father travelled. Graham teases her, she adores him, and her father sends for her. Eight years pass, a fortune is lost, and at twenty-three Lucy becomes companion to Miss Marchmont, who dies and leaves her fifteen pounds.
- Chapters 5–8 — London and the Rue Fossette: Lucy takes the coach to London, climbs St. Paul’s, and books passage on the packet Vivid to Boue-Marine, where she meets Ginevra Fanshawe. In Villette her trunk is left behind, a young Englishman helps her through the dark, and she finds a brass plate for Madame Beck’s pensionnat and is engaged that night. Madame Beck searches her clothes and keys at midnight.
- Chapters 9–12 — Dr. John, Ginevra and the nun: Ginevra boasts of a suitor called Isidore and his jewels; the school’s new surgeon, Dr. John, sets Fifine’s broken arm and is watched by everyone. Lucy hears a laugh and a man’s oath from the portress’s cabinet, and the summer brings the legend of the nun and the ivory casket of violets dropped in the forbidden alley, meant for the portress and read by the wrong woman.
- Chapters 13–15 — The fête and the long vacation: Lucy watches Madame Beck search her drawers and laughs and cries at once; a second billet is torn up unread. The annual fête is prepared and Lucy is locked in the attic to learn a fop’s part in a vaudeville, which she plays in a compromise costume. Then examinations and prizes, and the break-up: alone in the empty school she falls ill, goes out in a storm, confesses to Père Silas and faints at a church door.
- Chapters 16–19 — La Terrasse and the Cleopatra: She wakes in a house furnished with her godmother’s old chairs and finds that Dr. John is Graham Bretton. Mrs. Bretton nurses her at La Terrasse and she returns to school with an invitation to visit. She quarrels with Graham about Ginevra and is forgiven, Madame Beck prolongs her holiday, and in the gallery M. Paul Emanuel, just back from Rome, scolds her before a Cleopatra.
- Chapters 20–23 — The concert, Vashti and the garret: Mrs. Bretton dresses Lucy in pink for the concert attended by the King and Queen of Labassecour, and Graham sees Ginevra laugh at his mother. A letter from Graham arrives sealed in red wax, and Lucy reads it in the garret, where the nun appears and the letter vanishes. On a December night Graham takes her to see the actress Vashti and rescues a girl in the fire.
- Chapters 24–26 — The little Countess: Weeks pass without a letter, and Ginevra announces that her uncle, M. de Bassompierre, has come to Villette with his daughter. The daughter is Paulina Home, now seventeen, and the child of Bretton and the girl of the Hôtel Crécy recognise each other. Paulina visits the school, Graham falls in love, and Lucy buries her five letters in a jar under the pear-tree.
- Chapters 27–29 — The Hôtel Crécy and Monsieur’s fête: At the Athénée ceremony M. Paul delivers a republican speech and asks Lucy what she thinks of it; at the Hôtel Crécy dinner Ginevra and Paulina are set against each other and Graham moves from one to the other. M. Paul hisses at Lucy, apologises in the vestibule and calls her his friend. On the first of March she gives him a bead watchguard.
- Chapters 30–32 — The watchtower and the Dryad: M. Paul teaches Lucy arithmetic, demands a public French composition, and reveals that he has rented a room with a light in the window from which he watches her. He confesses his old love for Justine Marie, his vow and the three dependants he supports; then a shape in black and white sweeps out of the great tree. Paulina returns from France with Graham’s letter.
- Chapters 33–35 — The country breakfast and Malevola: On the first of May the school walks out to a farm breakfast, and M. Paul calls Lucy his little sister and asks how long she would remember him. In the Basse-Ville, on an errand for Madame Beck, she meets Madame Walravens and Père Silas, who tells her the story of Justine Marie. At the college examination she is accused of forgery, and afterwards makes peace with M. Paul.
- Chapters 36–38 — The apple of discord and the cloud: Père Silas leaves a tract in her desk and is appointed her spiritual director, and M. Paul, fearing for her soul, argues with her until they agree to pray for each other. Graham asks Paulina’s father for her and is accepted. Then, in July, the literature lesson is cancelled: Madame Beck announces that M. Paul is leaving Europe for the West Indies indefinitely.
- Chapters 39–42 — The happy pair and Finis: Lucy overhears the junta in the park: the Guadeloupe estate, Père Silas’s fear of apostasy, M. Paul’s gratitude being used to send him away. A note tells her to be ready; Madame Beck drugs her drink and she does not go. Ginevra elopes with de Hamal, who was the nun. M. Paul shows her the house in the Faubourg Clotilde and sails. Three years, a school, a storm, no certainty.
Villette: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Victorian
