Catalog Search Results
1) Villette
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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, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...
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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. The Professor is Charlotte Brontë's first novel, reflecting her own experience of life in Brussels and published after her untimely death. Viewed as a precursor to the narrative style and characterization she perfected in her later works, such as Jane Eyre, the novel is Brontë's portrayal of a love story from a male perspective. Writing from the point of view...
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This is the story of the savage, tormented foundling Heathcliff, who falls wildly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. A book of great power and strength, it is filled with the raw beauty of the moors and an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women. It is an understanding made even more extraordinary by the fact that...
4) Jane Eyre
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In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret. Charlotte Bronte's novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic, ever since...
5) Shirley
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Following the dramatic romance of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte intended Shirley to be a 'salutary' change. Set in Yorkshire during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel articulates the social realities of economic hardship, the Luddite riots, dissatisfaction with the government and an inadequate Church. In the foreground of these concerns, a mill-owner, Robert Moore, in pursuit of financial security, ignores the suffering of his workers to such...
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Overview: Anne, like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, published under a male pseudonym, Acton Bell, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victorian Era. Just as she had to use a male pseudonym in order to be free to publish, as women authors were not yet deemed acceptable or bankable, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, assumes an...
7) Agnes Grey
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Originally quite scandalous and based on the author's own troubled life, this biting social commentary reveals the hardships of a governess's life.
