The Professor (World's Classics S.) - Softcover

Bronte, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192827413 ISBN 13: 9780192827418

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1991

Synopsis

This novel, written in 1845-6 before "Jane Eyre", is described as challenging contemporary expectations by its brevity, realism and insistence of a working career before and after marriage for both its hero and heroine. The hero escapes from an uncongenial clerkship within the walls of a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium. Bronte traces his entanglement with the attractive "older woman", Zoraide Reuter, whose later cruel manoeuvres are designed to seperate him from the young, penniless girl who is both a teacher and a pupil in her school. The action begins against a background of the fight for better factory conditions in the 1830s, and finishes in the early 1840s with the spread of liberal ideas which would lead to the continental revolutions of 1848. This edition is based on the author's fair copy manuscript instead of on the corrupt text of the posthumous first edition of 1857. Also included here is "Emma", Charlotte Bronte's last, unfinished attempt to write a novel after "Villette", in a text printed from the manuscript instead of from the less reliable "Cornhill Magazine"-version of 1860.

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Review

At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë... It is the red and fitful glow of the heart's fire which illuminates her page. --Virginia Woolf

From the Back Cover

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death.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. Bronte's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Bronte's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0192827413
• ISBN 13: 9780192827418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 319