Professor, The

The middle and latter portion of The Professor is as good as I can write. It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre. - Charlotte Bront

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the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Annes Agnes Grey and Emilys Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bront s death.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