The Professor

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontë s first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Brontë is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. William s first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls school where he teaches, played out in the school s secret garden . Balanced against this is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Brontë s death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.

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