SOURCE: “From the Ending of The Professor to the Conception of Jane Eyre.” In Philological Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 71-89.

In the following essay, Rodolff discusses Brontë's move from the masculine narrator in The Professor to the feminine narrator in Jane Eyre, and focuses on the last two chapters of The Professor as the source of this transition.

Charlotte Brontë owed her facility in Jane Eyre to practice as well as to genius. Her Angria stories, written mostly in the 1830s, provided an extensive training in the art of fiction: the young author acquired technical skills and a serviceable store of subject matter by writing again and again about the same, and similar, Angrian characters, and by sometimes retelling the same stories with variations.¹ Moreover, in 1846 she completed a one-volume novel, The Professor (posthumously published in 1857). This “was a necessary stage” in the author's development, for...