An orphaned Englishman refuses his uncles' patronage, leaves a clerkship under his hard brother in the north, and goes to Brussels to teach — at a boys' school and at a girls' school whose directress sets out to captivate him. Charlotte Brontë wrote it first and could not place it — publisher after publisher declined; it appeared only after her death, by which time she had used the same Brussels material to far greater effect elsewhere. Read it for the plain, cold voice she never used again. Fifty-nine plates of mills, music, old age and the Fawcetts, from Millais and Ford Madox Brown, gather the plain northern weather and reformist temper of Brontë's Brussels.
