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For reasons I don't fully understand, I decided to read all the books written by the Brönte sisters. Emily wrote one book, Wuthering Heights, which IMHO is the worst of the lot. Everyone in the book is an irredeemable asshole. How is reading about such people interesting? Then, Anne wrote two, which no one ever reads except hard-core Literature nerds, and Charlotte wrote four, of which Jane Eyre is the most famous, and also the absolute best of the lot. Anyway, I'm finishing up this project on wading through the four Charlotte's. This is the third of the four I need to read to finish up my project.

FWIW, the whole point of this project is to make myself totally unique: I'm the only person who ever lived who has kicked a Nobel Lauriate in the shins (Dudley Herschbach), and, also, read all the novels written by the three Brönte sisters. At least that's my claim. Please correct me if you can.

Anyway, in this book, William Crimsworth is a young man who was brought up as a gentleman, but who has essentially no means. His family say they'll give him a competence if he will take up being a minister in the local church, and marry someone in particular, a cousin of some sort? He refuses, and is cut loose. He heads off to Belgium and gets a post as an English teacher in a private school. In Belgium, teachers are called "professors".

So, Crimsworth has adventures in Belgium. The woman who runs the girls school next door flirts with him for a bit. She also hires him to teach a class at her school, and Crimsworth becomes fascinated by one of his students, Francis Henri. Naturally, after lots of goings on, they get together, find themselves a way back to England and live happily ever after, or some such. ( )

It's been a long time since I've felt so relieved to be finished with a book! This was the most boring and irritating read I've encountered in a really long time. I would have abandoned it except it meets two of my reading challenges and I want to be able to say I've read all the Brontes.

Before I started reading the book, I wrote this: "I've always had a negative impression of CB… I think it’s Elizabeth Gaskell’s fault. I try to give her the benefit of the doubt but can’t seem to shake it. Somebody make me like her!!! ( )

Having just read a major Bronte biography I decided to read or re-read the Bronte sisters' novels starting with this first one of Charlotte's. However, although I remember loving "Jane Eyre", first read as a child, I didn't care for her first attempt. The plot is rambling and uneven, and the characters are not convincing. The hero, William Crimsworth, has been given a good education by his deceased mother's brothers, but they disown him when he refuses to go into the church as they want him to, since he lacks a vocation. He tries to become an industrialist by starting as a clerk at his older brother's firm, but the brother is extremely rude to him and does not acknowledge their relationship. An odd man called Hunsden, another man of business in the town, does him a "favour" by getting him sacked, but he does give him a letter of introduction to a friend in Brussels, and it is through that contact that William obtains a job he seems suited for - teacher at a boys' school. The school is owned by a man called Pelet who after a while tells him that the female head of the school next door would also like to engage him for English lessons for the girl pupils. Much of the story therefore is about what happens at the school and his entanglement with the headmistress and an unprepossessing teacher of needlework.

Although the author seems to have intended this to be a non-melodramatic story which tells of an ordinary man who gets on by stint of his own efforts, it does still rely on certain other characters putting themselves out for William, such as his odd friend Hunsden and a rich man in Brussels. In the case of the latter, William tells us that he is able to apply to this man for a recommendation to get him his next teaching job because he saved the man's son from drowning - this is then described at that point rather than earlier in the history where it belongs and seems rather too convenient and indeed, melodramatic.

Given that Charlotte spent time in Brussels at a girls' school situated next door to a school for boys - the two being run by a married couple - the major part of the book draws on her own experience and perhaps on her own prejudices. She and her sister Emily began by being pupils at the girls' school, and Charlotte went on to become a teacher there. It is clear that they kept a distance between themselves and the other pupils (in a letter she refers to herself and Emily being alone among numbers - an almost identical phrase used by her protagonist), and that she later felt isolated among the other teachers (in another letter she describes the utter misery of being left alone at the school during a holiday when the other teachers had all decamped to their family homes). Part of the reason was their different religion: nearly everyone else at the school was Roman Catholic rather than Protestant. While isolated at the school, Charlotte became desperate enough to go to the cathedral and confess (about her inappropriate attraction to the headmaster), and her later prejudice against Roman Catholics seems to date from that incident. The novel shows remarkable prejudice against the Flemish and some other European races, who are described very unflatteringly, and one of the major strikes against them is their Roman Catholicism, so it seems unavoidable that a lot of the narrator's prejudices are actually the author's own.

The characters most clearly developed in the book are the unpleasant ones, principally the headmaster and headmistress of the Belgian schools. Although not yet married when William starts work there, it is possible that the author has drawn on her own jaundiced views of their real-life equivalents. The headmistress in particular is very two-faced, and Charlotte certainly viewed her actual employer as being like that. The other major female character is William's love interest Frances, but she is rather a cipher and is chiefly characterised by her subservient devotion to her 'maitre' which it seems can be translated either as teacher or master.

The unevenness of the plot is shown by the fact that, after the main school part, a year and then ten years whizz past with just a summary. I also wasn't convinced that, even if Frances had run a successful school, they would have enough money for retirement to a nice house in the English countryside. The ending is also odd with its hint that Hunsden might somehow be contaminating their son with his cynical views.

One other problem is the annoying proportion of untranslated French for a reader not fluent in French, especially in a key scene where the narrator proposes to Frances - in fact, I looked up a copy on Project Gutenberg and copy/pasted some of the dialogue into a French to English translation engine just to find out what was being said.

All in all, this was rather a disappointment. I believe Charlotte reworked her Brussels experiences into 'Villette' so am hoping that will be rather better than this. As I couldn't enjoy it, I can only award it one star. ( )

I remember my first read of Jane Eyre when I devoured about 15 chapters in one sitting and this had a similar grab on me but then ended up getting shoved aside for books higher on my list and now I wish I had read it in just a day or two. I really enjoyed it but I lost some of the better plot connections by putting it aside so much. There is a note of Jane Eyre with the narrator, Crimsworth, having a difficult early time with people who just hate him for existing at all. He has some of Jane's strength of character and I grew to appreciate and root for him. My main issues is just the national and religious stereotypes that are both jarring to a modern ear and generally I found offensive. They might be ideas that existed then but I didn't like them anyway and they seemed to be without purpose in the narrative. Certainly, Crimsworth could dislike his French and Flemish students without making them national examples. But overall, I really did enjoy reading this lesser known work and look forward to the last one I haven't read.

I do have a minor complaint that my edition did not include any translations of the French and I struggled to figure that out but I think I managed to work out at least some of the meaning.