The Professor

William Crimsworth is a reserved English teacher at an all-girls' school in Brussels, and it is through his eyes - one of the only times Charlotte Bronte wrote from a male narrator's perspective - that this early novel unfolds. When Crimsworth falls for one of his pupils, the story draws closely on Bronte's own experience as a language student in Belgium. Completed as early as 1846, The Professor was her first novel, and she would later return to its story from a woman's point of view in Villette.