SOURCE: Introduction to The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Heather Glen, Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 7-31.

In the following essay, Glen disputes earlier critics’ claims that The Professor is an amateur or apprentice work, arguing instead that it provides a “coherent imaginative interrogation of values and assumptions” regarding masculinity and society.

The Professor was the first of Charlotte Brontë's four novels to be written. It is also by far the least known. Completed, probably, at some time in 1846, it was one of the ‘three distinct and unconnected tales’ that the Brontë sisters, as ‘Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’, began in that year to send out to publishers as ‘a work of fiction in 3 vols’. But unlike the other two of those tales, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, it failed to appear in its author's lifetime. Nine times, in all, it was rejected by publishers: the rejections continued...