The Professor Reading Order

The Professor (published posthumously, 1857) by Charlotte Brontë was her first novel, written before Jane Eyre but rejected by publishers until after her death — a story about William Crimsworth, an English teacher at a Belgian school, who tells his own story in the first person and falls in love with Frances Henri, a lace-mender who becomes his pupil and eventually his wife. The Professor is the least read of Charlotte's four novels and is generally regarded as the weakest — Crimsworth is a less engaging narrator than Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, and the novel's realistic mode (Charlotte was deliberately avoiding Gothic and Romantic machinery in an attempt to write something publishers would accept) produces a flatter narrative surface. But it is essential for understanding Charlotte Brontë's development: its materials (the Belgian school, the foreign setting, the unequal professional relationship between teacher and pupil) are the same as Villette's, and comparing the two novels shows directly how Charlotte transformed experience into fiction across a decade.