Charlotte Charlotte Bronte

The professor Charlotte Charlotte Bronte

This is the first novel that Charlotte Brontë 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the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on Charlotte's 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, this work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Brontë'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 Brontë's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.