Like The Professor, it’s not one of Charlotte Bronte’s most important novels. Set in Belgium, it prefers to poke fun at Catholicism and Flemish culture rather than make some fabulous commentary on British society, which she truly excelled at. Just like The Professor and Jane Eyre, it follows an often-unsympathetic, private young lady on the way to winning her fierce but eventually loving mate. Its principal interest lay in the eerie presentation of Lucy Snowe’s consciousness and its fantastic intersections with popery, lost relatives, and ghosts: by doing so, it continues the path Jane Eyre trod of linking the bildungsroman-romance genre with its Gothic past.