The Professor

An orphaned Englishman refuses his uncles' patronage, takes a clerkship in Brussels, and teaches at a girls' school run by a directress who has decided to marry 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.