The Professor
About this work
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publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death.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.
Where to find it
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Subjects
- British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)
- Teachers, fiction
- Belgium, fiction
- Teachers
- Fiction
- Social life and customs
- Triangles (Interpersonal relations)
- British
- Women teachers
- Long Now Manual for Civilization
- Torso
- Anatomy & histology