New Villette audiobook

Naxos Audiobooks releases this month a new Villette audiobook:

Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
Read by Mandy Weston
16 CDs • Running Time: c.17 hours • ISBN: 978-962-634-468-2 • Catalogue no: NAX46812 • RRP: £50.00

UNABRIDGED

Now considered by many to be Charlotte Brontë’s best novel, though unlikely to eclipse Jane Eyre in fame and popularity, Villette is largely concerned with the experiences of Lucy Snowe in a girl’s boarding school in a fictionalised Belgium. Lucy flees unhappiness in England only to find more abroad. Her love for Dr John unrequited, she slowly realises that a deeper attachment is growing between her and her irascible domineering mentor and colleague, M. Paul Emanuel. The promise of fulfilment and the realisation of love with a man with whom she might live on something like equal terms hangs in the balance in a story that dwells on powerful emotions without ever lapsing into sentimentality.

The Recording
Charlotte Brontë’s second most popular novel (after Jane Eyre) is actually a much greater challenge to read, not least because of the French. But Mandy Weston is an extremely experienced reader and with her accomplished French enjoyed herself in the studio.

It was recorded in a studio in a skyscraper in the centre of London’s West End, which felt rather odd during the week of recording. Once ensconced on the fifteenth floor, the atmosphere became rather nineteenth-century. But when finishing for the day, it was quite a shock for the Naxos AudioBooks team to go down in a lift and encounter, head-on, the freneticism of twenty-first-century Tottenham Court Road.

Notes by Mandy Weston, here.
Audio sample.

The Guardian publishes the following review:

The darkest and bleakest of Charlotte Brontë's novels - after Jane and Shirley, we have the far more complicated and secretive Lucy Snowe, a narrator who, like Agatha Christie's Roger Ackroyd, enjoys playing tricks on her readers by withholding information. There is something vaguely unsettling about her cool, objective observation of life: Snowe by name, icy by nature. Our heroine, who has no family, no fortune and no French, leaves England to become a schoolteacher in Villette, aka Brussels, where the author also taught. It's hard work. Madame Beck, the headmistress, is a control freak as the pupils - all girls of course - are out to get her. This is Lucy's first glimpse of her class: "I beheld opposite to me a row of eyes and brows that threatened stormy weather, eyes full of an insolent light and brows hard and unblushing as marble. The continental female is quite a different being to the insular female of the same age and class. I never saw such eyes and brows in England." Worst of all she is constantly haunted by the spectral figure of a nun who could teach Susan Hill's Woman in Black a few tricks about terror. Unrequited love, loneliness, depression: Lucy's life isn't a barrel of laughs, but Mandy Weston's highly expressive reading keeps you interested - no mean feat, it's a long haul. (Sue Arnold)

Categories: Audio-Radio, Villette