Bronte: Villette (Abridged)

Written by the author of the ever-popular Jane Eyre, Villette is widely admired as Charlotte Brontë's finest work. The story follows the fortunes of a young teacher at a girls' school in the French town of Villette and is superbly told by Mandy Weston. It is an adventure story, a romance and a French lesson all in one! The much-praised unabridged recording released last year returns here in a more accessible abridged format.

Villette was the third of Charlotte Brontë's novels to be published in her lifetime. In the following year, 1854, she finally accepted an offer of marriage, but owing to a combination of tuberculosis, complications arising from pregnancy and maybe even typhus, she died, just short of her thirty-ninth birthday.

She was the last of the six children born to Irish-born Reverend Patrick Brontë and his Cornish wife, Maria. Within a few years of moving into Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, his wife and his two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, had died, the former of cancer (1821), the latter two of the scourge of the age, pulmonary tuberculosis (1825).