With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Professor (1857) was Charlotte Bront's first and least regarded novel, rejected by all publishers during her lifetime and published posthumously by her widower A. B. Nicholls. Charlotte herself defended the novel passionately. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs -- that he should never get a shilling he had not earned." Indeed, William Crimsworth, the hero, is the self-made master of all his life's ambiguous fortune, including his career as a professor in Brussels, and his true love. Whatever the comparisons to Charlotte Bront's other, more popular novels, The Professor deserves a closer examination and a new reader perspective.