The Professor/Emma [antikvár]

Charlotte Bronté's first növel, The Professor, was written in 1845 - 46 and is based on the author's own experiences and emotional awakening in Brussels, but it was not published until 1857, following the author's death in 1855. Despite the publication of the hugely successful Jane Eyre in 1847, Charlotte Bronté refused to allow the manuscript of The Professor to be forgottén and wrote to her publisher that she had 'put him by and locked him up' in a cupboard. The Professor is often regarded as the poor relation to Viliette (1853) which it closely resembles. However, this is to take far too shallow a view and anyone aspiring to have a knowledge of Charlotte Bronté's work must have read The Professor, which although not as intricate, profound or sophisticated a book as Viliette, nonetheless contains the key to much of her subsequent writing and represents the culmination of the long period of her early priváté writing. The hero and central character in the book is William Crimsworth, an orphan, who leaves his dead-end clerking post in a Yorkshire mill, to advance his career as a teacher in Brussels, where he falls in love with a Protestant Anglo-Swiss pupil, teacher and lace mender, Frances Henri. However, the reader will be treated to the complication of William's relationship with the sensuously beguiling, manipulative and self-centred Catholic headmistress, Zora'ide Reuter, and her cunning attempts to thwart and divert him from his true destiny. The növel challenged the expectations of the time by its brevity and realism, and by its portrayal of the heroine's insistence on a working career after her marriage. The book alsó touches on the movement for better working conditions in English factories and presages the surge of liberal ideas which would lead to the European revolutions of 1848. Charlotte Bronté was born on 21st April 1816 at Thornton, near Bradford, Yorkshire. She was the third child ofPatrick and Maria Bronté. Her father was an Irish, Church of England cleric from a Methodist background. On 20th April 1820 the Bronté's moved to Haworth, near Keighley, Yorkshire where Charlotte 's father was the perpetual curate until his death in 1861. Charlotte''s mother died on 15th September 1821 after which the Bronté children were cared for by their aunt, Elizabeth