The Professor (Penguin Classics)

by Charlotte Bronte (Author), Charlotte Bronte (Author), Heather Glen (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $3.41

  The hero of Charlotte Bronte'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 Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $3.27

  This novel, written in 1845-6 before Jane Eyre , is described as challenging contemporary expectations by its brevity, realism and insistence of a working career before and after marriage for both its hero and heroine. The hero escapes from an uncongenial clerkship within the walls of a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium. Bronte traces his entanglement with the attractive older woman , Zoraide Reuter, whose later cruel manoeuvres are designed to seperate him from the young, penniless girl who is both a teacher and a pupil in her school. The action begins against a background of the fight for better factory conditions in the 1830s, and finishes in the early 1840s with the spread of liberal ideas which would lead to the continental revolutions of 1848. This edition is based on the author's fair copy manuscript instead of on the corrupt text of the posthumous first edition of 1857. Also included here is Emma , Charlotte Bronte's last, unfinished attempt to write a novel after Villette , in a text printed from the manuscript instead of from the less reliable Cornhill Magazine -version of 1860.

• New

  paperback
  

  $6.76

  With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Bronte is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. William's first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls' school where he teaches, played out in the school's 'secret garden'. Balanced against this is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Brontes death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.