The Professor

Before Jane Eyre made her, Charlotte Brontë wrote a novel almost nobody would publish. The Professor is narrated by William Crimsworth — a rarity for her, this is her only novel with a male narrator — an orphaned young clerk who quits a job he despises and talks his way into a teaching post at a boys' school in Brussels, then a girls' school next door, where he falls for a fellow teacher, Frances Henri, on terms as plain and unglamorous as everything else in the book. Brontë's own preface, printed here, states her method outright: her hero would earn every shilling by the sweat of his brow, marry no beauty and no fortune, and get no lucky turn the real world wouldn't have given him. Publishers wanted romance instead, and rejected it — one of them, Smith, Elder & Co., turned down The Professor but asked to see a longer work by the same hand, which is how Jane Eyre came to be published at all.

She kept trying to place it for years without success, and it never appeared in her lifetime. Her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, published it in 1857, two years after her death, over her own earlier decision to set it aside — a short note from him, printed here alongside her preface, explains why. It shares its Brussels setting and much of its emotional material with Villette, written years later and covering some of the same ground with a different narrator and a different reserve.

Bibliomancer restores the 1857 text exactly as Brontë wrote it.