The Professor

The Professor (1857) was Charlotte Brontë’s first and least regarded novel, rejected by all publishers during her lifetime and published posthumously by her widower A. B. Nicholls. Charlotte herself defended the novel passionately. “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs — that he should never get a shilling he had not earned.” Indeed, William Crimsworth, the hero, is the self-made master of all his life’s ambiguous fortune, including his career as a professor in Brussels, and his true love. Whatever the comparisons to Charlotte Brontë’s other, more popular novels, The Professor deserves a closer examination and a new reader perspective.