Le Professeur

Paris: Librairie De L. Hachette, 1858. First Edition. The scarce first French edition of Brontë’s first book, The Professor. 12mo (181 x 111mm), pp. [4], 299, [1]. Contemporary red half morocco and glossy speckled boards, spine blind ruled, lettered and decorated in gilt, speckled page edges and marbled endpapers. Light fading to the spine, rubbing to the extremities and a couple abrasions, else internally clean and very good. The Professor tells the story of William Crimsworth, a young Englishman who leaves behind a bitter relationship with his brother to seek his fortune as a teacher in Brussels, where he navigates professional rivalries and romantic entanglements before finding love with a modest and intelligent young pupil-teacher. Drawing heavily on Charlotte's own experiences at the Pensionnat Héger, the novel is a restrained, largely autobiographical study of self-reliance and emotional discipline, markedly quieter in tone than the works that followed it.

The manuscript was rejected by every publisher Charlotte submitted it to in the 1840s, and it was only after the extraordinary success of Jane Eyre in 1847 that her reputation was secured. The Professor remained unpublished in her lifetime; it appeared posthumously in 1857, two years after her death, with a preface by her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls. By that time Charlotte's standing as one of the foremost novelists of her generation was well established, though the reading public's fascination with the Brontë family had been deepened immeasurably by tragedy. Emily Brontë, whose single novel Wuthering Heights (1847) had received a mixed and often bewildered reception on its first appearance, died of tuberculosis in December 1848 at the age of thirty, never knowing the extraordinary critical stature her work would eventually achieve. Charlotte survived her by only six years, dying in March 1855 at thirty-eight. The posthumous publication of The Professor thus arrived as both a literary curiosity and a final offering from a family whose remarkable concentration of talent had been almost entirely extinguished within the span of a decade.