The title of the book Villette(1853) comes from the french word for town, ville, and is the name of city where most of the story is set.This title candidly draws attention to the fact that this novel is one of an urban environment and places an importance on that fact. This shows that the urban setting of the novel is more than an empty background and is crucial to the themes explored within it. In Villette, Charlotte Bronte uses urban landscapes to mirror the protagonist’s emotional state as attempts to repress her emotions and struggles to mourn what she has lost (Brown 353).It is important to note that the story is set in time which followed the Industrial Revolution. Urban populations had grown vastly and the development of trains had allowed for movement from the countryside to the city.Urbanisation lead to a new exploration of city spaces in the novel at the time (Warwick arts). In the Victorian era, one’s social class defined them in a far stricter way than it does today. It was highly important to “know your place”. The importance of “place” and how “place” affects our place of mind is explored through the urban environments in Villette.Society was socially divided and urbanisation deepened this division (Ingham 44).A division between the people of urban environments and people of rural environments arose.We are given an insight into Lucy’s prejudices towards those of rural environments in the chapter London: “the passengers were such as one in provincial towns; i felt sure i might venture alone”. Charlotte Bronte examines the theme of placelessness in Villette (Brown 361) through the setting of an ever changing urban environment.Many french people at this time had become unemployed due to Industrialisation and felt a sense of placelessness (Singh 4) like Lucy.The pensionnat where Lucy lives and works however is somewhat of an oasis of rurality amidst all of this change, a “large garden in the middle of the city”. Bronte is depicting the idea that “the city cannot be opposed to provinciality, for Villette is itself Provincial” as Villette is situated in "Labassecour", which is the French term for farmyard (Brown 350).The history of this fictional and generically titled town is lost to the reader, similar to that of Lucy’s history.The protagonist's sense of placelessness lies in her job as a governess (Brown 362), she is of the working-middle-class.It is untold whether or not she has a family,yet the reader is given the sense that the death of Miss Marchmont was not her first experience of loss.Although the protaganist never reveals her past to the reader, it painfully present,it interlaces her thoughts,she cannot repress it. In the l’allée défendue, with no bustling city to distract her, Lucy Snowe reveals that there was a time in her childhood, a time when she did not have to repress what she felt: “Oh my childhood!I could feel”. Her repression leaves her lost in space and time. Whilst adrift in both Villette and London however, she finds herself “making the most of present pleasure”(Bronte 39). The first urban space Lucy encounters in Villette is London. As she walks through London, she feels “the heart of city life”(Bronte 32), something about the life that has been experienced by other people on the streets which she walks, gives her perspective. She