William Crimsworth escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher. An entanglement with an older woman, the sensuous but manipulative Zoraïde Reuter, complicates his affections for the student-teacher at Reuter's school.
Told from the point of view of the only male narrator that Brontë used, The Professor formulates a new aesthetic that questions many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Based on the author's experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842, it endures today as a harbinger of Brontë's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.
