Unromantic as Monday morning.

The phrase uses a deliberately prosaic benchmark—“Monday morning”—to puncture any aura of romance. Monday morning conventionally signals the return to routine, labor, and obligation after the freedoms of the weekend; calling something “unromantic as Monday morning” frames it as starkly ordinary, unpoetic, and resistant to idealization. In Brontë’s fictional world, such a comparison would typically function as a corrective to sentimentality: it insists on the texture of real life (work, duty, constraint) over dreamy expectation. The simile’s bite comes from its cultural immediacy: nearly any reader recognizes Monday morning as the opposite of escapist fantasy.