The Professor - Hardcover

Charlotte Bronte

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1934169420 ISBN 13: 9781934169421

Publisher: Norilana Books, 2006

Synopsis

The Professor (1857) was Charlotte Brontė's first and least regarded novel, rejected by all publishers during her lifetime and published posthumously by her widower A. B. Nicholls.

Charlotte herself defended the novel passionately. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs -- that he should never get a shilling he had not earned."

Indeed, William Crimsworth, the hero, is the self-made master of all his life's ambiguous fortune, including his career as a professor in Brussels, and his true love. Whatever the comparisons to Charlotte Brontė's other, more popular novels, The Professor deserves a closer examination and a new reader perspective.

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publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Brontė's death.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

Celebrated British authoress, Charlotte Bronte is best-known for her novels which have achieved the status of world-famous classics. Marked by individuality, her writing style is outstanding for its exquisite sensibility, intense passion and zealous honesty.

About this edition

• Publisher: Norilana Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1934169420
• ISBN 13: 9781934169421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 253