The Professor Charlotte Bronte

Why The Professor Charlotte Bronte is still the most frustrating read in the canon

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte was written between 1845 and 1846, submitted to multiple publishers, and rejected in its entirety. Jane Eyre came out two years later and made her career. The Professor sat around for over a decade before anyone thought it was worth publishing. That context matters more than most people realize when they're grading papers on it. It's a first-person novel about a man named William Crimsworth who flees England, takes a job teaching at a girls' school in Brussels, and gets caught between an older woman he's supposed to marry and a younger woman he actually wants. The Brussels sections are directly drawn from Charlotte's own time at the Pensionnat Heger. The first half, set in England, is almost a different book entirely — thinner, more generic, and frankly less interesting. Most readers skim past it. I tell my students to push through, but honestly, if you're reading this for pleasure, the England material is where you might find yourself losing patience. The narrative voice is deliberately flat. Crimsworth is meant to be uncharismatic, and Bronte knew it. That's the whole point. He's not a Rochester. He's not a Heathcliff. He's a middle-aged man trying to rebuild his life after a family business collapsed, and the novel is structured around his slow awakening to the fact that he's been treating people as instruments for his own comfort. The prose doesn't try to seduce you. That's why some readers find it dull. It's also why it's more interesting than most people give it credit for.

What happens when you actually try to teach this book? The main problem is that students come in expecting Jane Eyre. They open it and Crimsworth is a man, not a woman, and his voice is skeptical and controlled, and suddenly the text doesn't reward emotional investment the way their prior experience told them it would. I had a student last semester who spent three weeks convinced the book was "basically about nothing." She was right, sort of. It's about the slow erosion of self-deception. But getting her to the point where she could articulate that took six separate conversations and a lot of pointing at specific passages. The book doesn't hand you its themes. You have to hunt for them. One specific edge case that comes up constantly: the framing device. Crimsworth presents himself as a writer recounting his own story, which means the narrative is filtered through his self-justification at every turn. Students read him at face value and treat his opinions as the book's opinions. The workaround I use is to make them keep a running list of every time Crimsworth contradicts himself. Within 30 pages they're finding three or four instances. By chapter eight, it's a pattern. The text is quietly undermining its own narrator from the beginning. That realization shifts everything about how you read the rest of it. There's also the question of how The Professor Charlotte Bronte relates to Villette, which she basically rewrote the same story five years later with a female protagonist. A lot of people treat them as interchangeable, but they're not. Villette is sharper, more psychologically complex, and better structured. The Professor has raw material that makes it valuable for comparative study — the male gaze inverted, the Brussels setting handled with less literary polish, the romantic plot more straightforward — but as a standalone novel, Villette is the stronger work. If you're trying to decide which one to read first, read Villette. Then come back to The Professor and you'll see exactly what she was working toward.

The biggest practical difficulty with this text is probably the academic apparatus around it. Every edition has a different editorial stance on how much Brussels material was changed or cut. Some scholars argue the 1857 edition (published after Charlotte's death) altered her original manuscript significantly. If you're writing a paper that depends on a specific passage about the Heger family or Adèle, you need to know which version you're working from. The Chawton House Library edition is generally considered the most reliable for scholarly purposes, but it's not cheap. The Norton Critical Edition is more affordable and includes solid annotations, though some of the critical essays are dated.

How to actually get something out of reading it

Don't approach it as a romance novel. Don't approach it as Jane Eyre volume two. Read it as an unusually candid early attempt by Bronte to write a man's interior life, complete with all the blind spots and rationalizations that entails. Crimsworth's treatment of women — especially his condescending attitude toward Frances and his objectifying gaze toward Henriette — isn't presented as heroic. Bronte wants you to notice it. The problem is that her technique is so restrained that modern readers trained on more psychologically explicit fiction sometimes miss the critique entirely. If you're doing this for a class, the most useful passage to annotate closely is the opening of Chapter Two, where Crimsworth describes his brief, disastrous stint in the West Indies. It's often skipped because it's short and seems peripheral, but it establishes the entire template for his character: he runs away from responsibility, dresses badly, eats poorly, and then blames the locals for his failure. Everything that follows in the Brussels sections is a variation on that pattern until he finally confronts it. Mapping those repetitions is how you prove you've actually read the thing rather than just absorbed the plot summary. The alternative approach is to skip ahead to Villette and read The Professor as a draft version. That works too, and honestly, it's how most of us encountered it originally. Both routes are valid. Just don't treat the book as a curiosity or a footnote. It's Charlotte Bronte at work before she fully found her voice, which makes it imperfect, not irrelevant.