The Professor (Penguin Popular Classics) - Softcover

Bronte, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140621423 ISBN 13: 9780140621426

Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics, 1995

Synopsis

Brontė, Charlotte. The Professor. London, Penguin Books, 1995. 11 x 18cm. 256 pages. Original softcover. Excellent condition. [Penguin Popular Classics]. The Professor was the first novel by Charlotte Brontė. It was originally written before Jane Eyre and rejected by many publishing houses, but was eventually published posthumously in 1857 by approval of Charlotte's husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who accepted the task of reviewing and editing of the novel. The novel is based upon Charlotte Brontė's experiences in Brussels, where she studied as a language student and was a teacher in 1842. Much of the subject matter of The Professor was later reworked, from the perspective of a female teacher, into Brontė's novel Villette, which received critical acclaim.

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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the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Brontė's death.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."


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"We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that . . . they only have to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things."

--Virginia Woolf

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140621423
• ISBN 13: 9780140621426
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256