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William Crimsworth, an orphan of good family, refuses to become a clergyman and goes to work as a clerk for his harsh elder brother, a mill owner in the…
William Crimsworth, an orphan of good family, refuses to become a clergyman and goes to work as a clerk for his harsh elder brother, a mill owner in the north of England. Escaping to Brussels, he becomes a teacher in a boys' school and then in the neighbouring girls' school, where he resists the charms of the scheming headmistress, Mademoiselle Reuter, and falls in love with a poor, serious Anglo-Swiss pupil teacher, Frances Henri.
Context and significance
This was Charlotte Brontë's first novel, written in 1846, but publishers rejected it and it appeared only in 1857, after her death. She later reworked its Brussels material into Villette. Read Jane Eyre, and see her life.
About the author
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote tiny books about them. Her two elder sisters died after a harsh boarding school, the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.
After working as a teacher and governess and studying in Brussels, she published poems with her sisters under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and in 1847 Jane Eyre made her famous. She outlived all her siblings, married in 1854 and died the following year. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights.