The Professor (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Brontė, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192835114 ISBN 13: 9780192835116

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The hero of Charlotte Brontė's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraļde Reuter, complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school. Also included in this edition is Emma, Charlotte Brontė's last, unfinished novel. Both works are drawn from the original Clarendon texts.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Brontė 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the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Brontė's death.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. Brontė'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 Brontė's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.
    "The middle and latter portion of The Professor is as good as I can write," proclaimed Brontė. "It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre."
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

About the Author

Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) was an English novelist, the eldest of the three Bronte sisters whose novels have become enduring classics of English literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192835114
• ISBN 13: 9780192835116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Smith Margaret, Rosengarten Herbert