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. <p>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. <p>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.