The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

The 19th-century British authoress is a paradox- Austen and the Brontes, save Charlotte, never married, and even Charlotte not until she was 39, and then only a year before she died. But all their respective works deal almost exclusively with romance. It lends their books a poignant irony.

The Professor is so plainly autobiography combined with wistful daydreaming that I could only read it detachedly. A young, intelligent, uncommitted British man, William Crimsworth, seeks employment abroad in Brussels. He becomes a schoolteacher, falls in love with an impoverished student of his, marries her, runs a school with her for some years, and eventually settles comfortably in England. As a student and teacher herself in Brussels, Charlotte undoubtedly must have developed an attachment, or dreamed of one, at least, and decided to transform her unfulfilled hopes into a novel.

William has setbacks and obstacles, but they are systematically taken care of. Crimsworth is essentially faultless- studious, scrupulous, religious, fastidious, not too good-looking. He is more or less destined to succeed in life. His love, Frances, is much the same, but being a woman at that period of time, attempting to maintain a level of self-sufficient decency, her chances at happiness before Crimsworth entered the picture were not as certain. Some of the most telling passages occur when Crimsworth discusses with his now-wife what she would have become if he had not married her. "Had I been an old maid," she avers, "I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void...and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women."

The book lacks the breadth and scope of Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it contains many little oddities besides. Crimsworth has an inordinate confidence in physiognomy, often describing his acquaintances solely in terms of the relation of their features to their personalities. Many conversations in the novel are carried on entirely in French, obviously intended for an audience better educated than myself. Both Crimsworth and Frances denounce Catholicism with a vigor rarely seen in novels of romance.

Male first-person protagonists drawn by female writers are overwhelmingly idealized and hardly believable. Bronte's hero complies with this, exhibiting a markedly effeminate sensibility towards life. The timid but steadfast young woman and the dashing lover come to rescue her found in Jane Eyre are prefigured here, but Frances and Crimsworth are not nearly as compelling or as vivid as Jane and Rochester.