Professor

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bront 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the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bront's death.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.

Bront'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 Bront's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.The middle and latter portion of The Professor is as good as I can write, proclaimed Bront.

It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre.