Villette is an 1853 novel written by English author Charlotte Brontë. Villette begins with its famously passive protagonist, Lucy Snowe, age 14, staying at the home of her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the clean and ancient town of Bretton , in England. After an unspecified family disaster, the protagonist Lucy Snowe travels from her native England to the fictional French-speaking city of Villette to teach at a girls school, where she is drawn into adventure and romance. During the course of the novel, Lucy has three encounters with the figure of a nun — which may be the ghost of a nun who was buried alive on the school s grounds as punishment for breaking her vow of chastity. In a highly symbolic scene near the end of the novel, she discovers the nun s habit in her bed and destroys it. She later finds out that it was a disguise worn by Ginevra s amour, Alfred de Hamal. The episodes with the nun no doubt contributed substantially to the novel s reputation as a gothic novel.