The Professor

In this first novel, Brontë drew on her recent experiences as a student and teacher in a Belgian girls' school. She wrote it while struggling with the most emotionally harrowing event of her adult life, her unreciprocated romantic attraction to her married teacher in Brussels, Constantin Heger. This background lends the first-person narrative a quality that would become a hallmark of Brontë's style: a striking emotional intensity.

William Crimsworth, the Bronte's only male narrator, a teacher in Belgium, becomes involved in a flirtation with the headmistress of the school, but that ends when he falls in love with a student-teacher. The jealousy of the jilted headmistress creates obstacles to happiness. Considered to be the basis for Bronte's better-known work, "Villette."

Library Journal

This first novel went unpublished during Bront 's lifetime, rejected by publishers each time it was submitted despite her growing fame for such works as Jane Eyre and Shirley. It was released only after her untimely passing, when there was a great hunger for anything from the pen of this now-famous author, but it was a poor addition to her work. A critic in 1857 wrote that it was "crude, unequal, and unnatural to a fault; it has all the unripe qualities of a bad first work ." And indeed it is dreary and confusing, uninvolving and filled with minutiae, and suffers from many awkward and improbable devices, not the least of which is the choice of a male protagonist to tell a tale with many autobiographical aspects. The reading by James Wilby is expert and probably as exciting and dramatic as is possible, given the material. Comprehensive literary collections will want to add this early work of a major author, but more popular collections can safely pass it by.--Harriet Edwards, East Meadow P.L., NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 in Yorkshire to Patrick Brontë, a clergyman, and his wife Maria. Together with her sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte would turn the insular Brontës into one of the most famous families in English literary history. She married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died a year later of complications from pregnancy.