The Professor
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: September 23, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9780679602736
Subjects: 19th century fiction; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Bronte, Charlotte, 1816-1855; Women teachers; Literature: Classics; Triangles (Interpersonal relations); Classics; Fiction / General; 19th century; Belgium; British; Brussels; Brussels (Belgium); Fiction; Social life and customs; Teachers; Triangles (Interpersonal relat
First sentence: THE OTHER DAY, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance: DEAR CHARLES - I think when you and I were at Eton together, we were neither of us what could be called popu
Description: 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publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death.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.
Notes: Modern Library