The Professor - Charlotte Bronte - Bookniverse

The Professor was the very first novel Charlotte Brontë' ever wrote, completed in 1846, though it was not published until 1857 — two years after her death. The story is told in the first person by its narrator, William Crimsworth, a young Englishman of good education but little money. Leaving England behind, William travels to Brussels, where he finds work as a teacher of English in a boys' school. There he encounters the headmaster Monsieur Pelet, a cunning man, and the neighbouring girls' school run by the ambitious Mademoiselle Reuter, with whom William becomes dangerously entangled. It is, however, a young Swiss pupil-teacher named Frances Henri who captures his heart — a quiet young woman of intelligence and dignity, who shares William's love of literature and his determination to be independent. Their slow courtship forms the emotional core of the novel. ****************************Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, in England, and she was one of six children, and the Brontë family is one of the most extraordinary in the history of English literature: three of the sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — all became published novelists of lasting importance. Their childhood was marked by loss; their mother died when Charlotte was just five years old, and two of her elder sisters died in childhood as well. Charlotte worked as a teacher and governess before travelling with her sister Emily to Brussels in 1842, ostensibly to improve their French and German in preparation for opening their own school. It was in Brussels that Charlotte fell deeply and painfully in love with her married teacher, Constantin Héger — a man of great intellect and passion who inspired several of the compelling male figures in her fiction. This experience in Brussels, the city's schools, its characters and its atmosphere, fed directly into the writing of The Professor, making it one of the most autobiographical of all her novels.