An Englishwoman with no money and no beauty teaches in a Brussels boarding school and falls in love with a man who is rude to her. Charlotte Brontë had done exactly this, including the hopeless attachment to her married employer, and wrote the book after all three of her siblings had died within nine months. The ending refuses to say what happened. Fifty-four plates by painters including Edvard Munch and James Tissot follow the sea, harbours and ships that frame Lucy Snowe's crossing and her life in a foreign port.