📖 The Professor

"The Professor", written in 1845-6 before Jane Eyre, challenged contemporary expectations of the novel by its brevity, realism, and insistence on a working career both before and after marriage for its hero and heroine. William Crimsworth escapes from an uncongenial clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium. He becomes entangled with a sensuously attractive "older woman", whose later, suavely cruel manoeuvres are designed to separate him from the penniless girl who is both a teacher and a pupil in her school. Strikingly up to date for its era, the action begins amid the fight for better factory conditions in the 1830s, and ends in the early 1840s with that spread of liberal ideas which would lead to the continental revolutions of 1848. This edition is based directly on the author's fair copy manuscript instead of on the corrupt text of the posthumous first edition of 1857, and includes "Emma", Charlotte Bronte's last, unfinished attempt to write a novel...