The Professor - Hardcover

The Professor (1857) was Charlotte Brontë's first and least regarded novel, rejected by all publishers during her lifetime and published posthumously by her widower A. B. Nicholls.

Charlotte herself defended the novel passionately. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs -- that he should never get a shilling he had not earned."

Indeed, William Crimsworth, the hero, is the self-made master of all his life's ambiguous fortune, including his career as a professor in Brussels, and his true love. Whatever the comparisons to Charlotte Brontë's other, more popular novels, The Professor deserves a closer examination and a new reader perspective.

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Bronte's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Bronte's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.