My Weekly Book

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

This is a cautionary tale about not getting disheartened by publishers’ rejections - because if Charlotte Bronte had, the world would never have seen Jane Eyre. That’s a trite sentence - but this, the first of her four completed novels, was not well-received and was not published until after her death in 1855.

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It is, by popular consent, the least of her works – but when one is talking about a writer of the stature of Charlotte Bronte that still leaves plenty of room for it to be a substantial and satisfying read. So far I have only read this and Jane Eyre itself – which of course was immensely worthwhile. But I did find it required a considerable amount of effort and concentration on my part to get the most from it. And, although I found it very rewarding and was satisfied to have it under my belt, I was left with a distinct feeling that it came behind both Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice in my personal lexicon of favourites. (God, what a sap Rochester is! Give me Darcy or even Heathcliff any day of the week. OK, OK, I realise I’m only revealing my own character flaws now…)

I found this readable and enjoyable, getting through its 250 pages in around a week of train and Tube journeys. I’m not sure whether or not I was in the presence of greatness but sometimes greatness can be a bit of a strain, see above. I found the authorial voice very strong and that a little knowledge about her life, times and opinions went a long way towards explaining the milieu of this novel. I liked and admired the heroine, who is largely a woman of spirit, and who refuses to submit to popular prejudice by continuing to work after her marriage – something it was still hard to do in Britain as late as the 1960s. The hero was a bit of a pompous ass at times – but a good-hearted, right-thinking sort, as it turned out. I found the references to the political background of the times fascinating.

All in all, I thought, a very worthwhile read and one that made me more rather than less inclined to pick up Vilette, which is sitting on the shelf waiting for me. To give a little more insight, I could do a lot worse than quote the blurb on the back of the World’s Classics edition I just returned to the library:

‘The middle and latter portion of the work… is as good as I can write; it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre’

The Professor, written in 1845-6 before Jane Eyre, challenged contemporary expectations of the novel by its brevity, realism, and insistence on a working career both before and after marriage for its hero and heroine. William Crimsworth escapes from an uncongenial clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium. He becomes entangled with a sensuously attractive ‘older woman’, whose later, suavely cruel manoeuvres are designed to separate him from the penniless girl who is both a teacher and a pupil in her school. Strikingly up-to-date for its era, the action begins amid the fight for better factory conditions in the 1830s, and ends in the early 1840s with that spread of liberal ideas which would lead to the continental revolutions of 1848.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 11:22 am and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.