In the Library
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë, 1857
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 26
- Length
- Length 88k words
£1.99
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About the book
In a Brussels schoolroom an English master works down a pile of student exercises and stops at one. The English limps at the edges; the mind behind it does not. Frances Henri teaches lace-mending in the same building and pays for her lessons out of what that earns, and William Crimsworth, who has refused a rich uncle's patronage and clerked for a brother who used him like furniture, understands he has just met the only equal he has in the city. What follows is the plainest love story the Brontës ever told and the most stubborn: two poor people who admire each other's minds, and a wife who builds her own school after the wedding because she will not be kept herself. Charlotte Brontë wrote this one first, and the refusals it collected sent her back to the desk that produced Jane Eyre. It reached print only once she was dead. She had been the pupil in Brussels, writing to a married teacher who did not write back; here she turned every position round and let the love be answered.