«Villette» by Charlotte Brontë

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls's boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, a headmistress who spies on her staff, and her own complex feelings – first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel.

Villette, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel, is a powerfully moving look at isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.