[In the following essay, Malone explores the claim by some critics that Brontë fails to credibly produce a male protagonist in The Professor. Malone argues that it is not possible for a male protagonist to relate convincingly the type of suffering about which Brontë sought to write.]

‘The Professor appears before the public under circumstances which preclude criticism’,¹ mourned the Saturday Review in June 1857. Smith, Elder's decision to publish Gaskell's biography and Charlotte Brontë's first written novel in close succession was clearly an astute move. On its publication, Jane Eyre was condemned as immoral and unchristian,² as emphatically a bad book,³ as a book not to be given to the young.⁴ Less than ten years later, the Edinburgh Review is declaring, ‘It is impossible to speak without the deepest interest and sympathy of the genius, the trials, and the fate of Charlotte Brontë’.⁵ It was The Life of Charlotte Brontë which was responsible for the transformation into popular heroine, precipitating the gradual reappraisal of Brontë which had begun upon her death in 1855 with the subsequent revelation of some of the circumstances of her life.

Brontë's life was now found to contain all the necessary elements for elevation to a Victorian model of womanhood: an isolated, religious childhood; literary precocity; unstimulating, unappreciated work as a governess and teacher; devotion to duty and family none the less; fortitude in the face of family deaths; reward through fame and marriage to a clergyman. Thus 1857 finds Brontë being held up as a pattern of ‘the moral battle of life fought out and nobly won’:

the lives of the saints were the theology of the monasteries. In the heroines, and the confessors, and martyrs, men saw before them examples of what they, too, might become. These forms have passed away, but the substance remains; and, as little as Charlotte Bronté [sic] knew it, she was earning for herself a better title than many a St. Catherine, or St. Bridget, for a place among those noble ones whose virtues are carved out of rock, and will endure to the end.⁶

By the end of the decade, Women of Beauty and Heroism (1859), Heroines of Our Time: Being the Sketches of the Lives of Eminent Women, with Examples of their Benevolent Works, Truthful Lives, and Noble Deeds (1860), and Women of Worth (1859) all contain chapters on Brontë. In the last of these, alongside ‘The Newgate Schoolmistress—Elizabeth Fry’ and ‘The Earnest Christian—Lady Warwick’, appears ‘The Worthy Daughter—Charlotte Brontë’: ‘Everything was against her through life—plainness of person, poverty, a solitude and sensitiveness of soul that no one could appreciate, and disappointment of almost every expectation and wish. Yet she nobly struggled on—her watchword duty and her reliance Heaven.’⁷ Emerging as it did amid this euology, few critics castigated The Professor as they had Brontë's previous works.⁸ The Eclectic Review concludes upon the biography, ‘now that we have finished the strange, sad story, we have no heart for mere literary criticism … others may criticize her writings—we are unable to think of anything but her life.’⁹

In the long term, however, The Professor has perhaps suffered from the timing of its publication. Since Brontë's personal history embraced many of the components of Victorian popular fiction and was brought to the public by an acclaimed novelist, the Life was treated almost as a novel itself. To the British Quarterly Review, ‘the story of this remarkable woman, told with such deep and simple pathos by her gifted and affectionate biographer, becomes as interesting as the tale of a second Jane Eyre’.¹⁰ It was the beginning of the merging of Brontë facts and Brontë fictions. Critics were more interested in the drama of the Life than in the ‘chastised, controlled, subdued temper’¹¹ of The Professor, and those critics who did pronounce upon the novel invariably did so in the light of the biography, endeavouring to equate the characters with those in Brontë's life or at best, with her later literary creations: ‘Hunsden is an undeveloped Rochester’;¹² ‘the Professor is a woman in disguise,—as indeed she proves to be,—for she is quite properly stripped of her male costume, and turned into “Lucy Snowe” in Villette. There is a shyness, a sulky tenderness, and disposition to coquet manifest in the Professor's relations with his friend the Yorkshire manufacturer’;¹³ ‘Into the character of the Professor himself the writer has transferred much from her own nature’.¹⁴ An American critic, Margaret Sweat, extends the biographical interest of the novel to an influence by Emily and Anne—‘its choice of material … reminds us of her sisters rather than of herself as we now know her’¹⁵—although it is difficult to imagine that she could see in Crimsworth the passion of Heathcliff, the depravity of Arthur Huntingdon, or the piety of William Weston. ‘We are unable to think of anything but her life’: a pattern for criticism of The Professor was thus established which has changed remarkably little in the twentieth century. But should the novel be so read?

Contemporary critics were bemused by the character of Crimsworth, finding him either ‘dull’¹⁶ or, after the intense engagement between narrator and reader in Brontë's other novels, aloof: ‘The principles and the art of the author, though true, excite no corresponding sympathy on the part of the reader,—few demands being made on his softer or gentler nature. There is no Helen Burns that we can watch or weep over,—no sprightly little Adele [sic] that we can sport with.’¹⁷ Yet both qualities, so at odds with the typical self-portrayal of an autobiographer, are central to why Crimsworth is so interesting, if not likeable, a character. Why did Brontë choose to make her hero so unengaging? The answer surely lies in the novel's form. As in Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë plays upon the potential in autobiographic narratives for discrepancy between the narrator's and the reader's perceptions of the text. An abandoned Preface to The Professor, probably written in November or December 1847 when Brontë was first attempting to persuade Smith, Elder to reconsider the work for publication, highlights this aspect by having a more objective observer, a friend of Crimsworth's, introduce the manuscript:

I had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Crimsworth very well—and can vouch for his having been a respectable man—though perhaps not altogether the character he seems to have thought he was. Or rather—to an impartial eye—in the midst of his good points little defects and peculiarities were visible of which he was himself excusably unconscious—An air—a tone of his former profession lingered over & round him—a touch of the pedagogue—unobtrusive but also unmistakeable.¹⁸

One of the most notable examples of Crimsworth being ‘not altogether the character he … thought he was’ is his perception of his sexuality. Crimsworth likes to believe he is set apart from other men—‘“I must follow my own devices—I must till the day of my death—because I can neither comprehend, adopt nor work out those of other people”’ (p. 52)—and includes his lack of interest in women as a facet of that superiority. He observes of his brother's wife's childish mannerisms, ‘this lisp and expression were, I have no doubt, a charm in Edward's eyes, and would be so to those of most men—but they were not to mine’ (p. 13), and of Frances, that she is ‘for a sensualist—charmless’ (p. 168). Yet while at the beginning of the novel he declares an interest only in women with ‘the clear, cheering gleam of intellect’ (p. 13), asserting that for a professor, feminine ‘mental qualities; application, love of knowledge, natural capacity, docility, truthfulness, gratefulness are the charms that attract his notice and win his regard’ (p. 120), the puritanical image he presents is continually undermined by his regard for physical beauty, manifest in his obsession with the boarded window in his bedroom at M. Pelet's, and his observations on his female pupils and the women with whom he has already come into contact. During the party at his brother's house, Crimsworth is not introduced to the ‘group of very pretty girls’ surrounding Edward and feels that he can take no part in the dancing: ‘Many smiling faces and graceful figures glided past me—but the smiles were lavished on other eyes—the figures sustained by other hands than mine—turned away tantalized’ (p. 24).

Similarly, it is Mlle Reuter's outer rather than inner charms which chiefly attract Crimsworth. It is he who nearly falls in love with Zoraïde and she, confident in her relationship with Pelet, who plays with his affections. Although any relationship between the two has been largely of Crimsworth's imagining, on discovering the engagement, he considers Zoraïde and Pelet's deceit an act of ‘treachery’ (p. 112)—one which does not just cause him momentary bitterness, shame, or embarrassment but temporarily extinguishes his entire ‘faith in love and friendship’ (p. 111). Within a short space of time, he has eradicated any feeling of culpability from his mind to such an extent that he is able to maintain, ‘Neither could [Hunsden] suspect for an instant the history of my communications with Mdlle. Reuter; secret to him and to all others was the tale of her strange infatuation: her blandishments, her wiles had been seen but by me, and to me only were they known’ (p. 205); her ‘infatuation’ is indeed known only to Crimsworth because it existed only in his mind. Even after he has fallen in love with and determined to marry Frances, he continues to be powerfully attracted to Zoraïde, to the point of being capable of adultery. Crimsworth is told by Pelet that he would be welcome to remain in his establishment after he has married Zoraïde, but declines the offer: ‘I was no pope—I could not boast infallibility—in short—if I stayed, the probability was that in three months' time, a practical Modern French novel would be in full process of concoction under the roof of the unsuspecting Pelet’ (p. 187). Since the consequence of rejecting the offer is that he must find other lodgings, he later considers the possibility that his intended step is unnecessarily severe: ‘“And all this,” suggested an inward voice, “because you fear an evil which may never happen!” “It will happen; you know it will;” answered that stubborn monitor, conscience’ (p. 188). That which he first poses as a ‘probability’ he now confesses, extraordinarily, to be a certainty. Crimsworth, then, is not a character to be taken at his ‘dull’ face value, on his own terms. The Critic was one of the few contemporary voices to express some reservations about the hero: ‘Had the description of the three young Graces of the “pensionnat” come from a “bonâ fide” Professor, we certainly should refuse to recommend him for any such post for the future’;¹⁹ while to the Literary Gazette, the same passage is a series of ‘voluptuous descriptions which, ploughing up the passions at every sentence, give occasion to much wonder’.²⁰

The majority of contemporary critics ascribed Crimsworth's reserved, unappealing nature to the fact that Brontë ‘had not yet attained to that powerful delineation of character which constitutes the charm of her later performances’.²¹ Brontë herself confessed to a weakness in the depiction of male characters:

You both [James Taylor and W. S. Williams] complain of the want of distinctness and impressiveness in my heroes. Probably you are right. In delineating male character I labour under disadvantages: intuition and theory will not always adequately supply the place of observation and experience. When I write about women I am sure of my ground—in the other case, I am not so sure.²²

Many modern critics, therefore, look no further in accounting for the comparative failure of The Professor. However, I would argue that the failing is not that Brontë cannot convincingly create male protagonists but that a male protagonist cannot convincingly tell the type of story Brontë wanted to narrate: a history of suffering. Brontë sets out her intention for her hero in the Preface—‘that whatever small competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow … As Adam's Son he should share Adam's doom—Labour throughout life and a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment’ (pp. 3-4)—but in the event Crimsworth's life is not one of true sweat or labour because throughout the novel he is able to rely on the privileges of his sex and class. The Economist is representative of contemporary, and some modern, criticism in claiming, ‘The rather dismal little heroine of “Villette”, Lucy Snowe, is transformed here into a young man who is “the Professor” of the story’²³ but the different gender of the two characters makes for two very different novels. A typical example is each protagonist's first morning on the Continent. Crimsworth is buoyant:

I never experienced a freer sense of exhilaration than when I sat down at a very long black table (covered however in part by a white cloth), and, having ordered breakfast, began to pour out my coffee from a little black coffee-pot. … [A] gentleman, after looking towards me once or twice, politely accosted me in very good English …

I lingered over my breakfast as long as I could, while it was there on the table and while that stranger continued talking to me, I was a free, independent traveller …

(pp. 58-9)

He then walks to Mr Brown's where he presents Hunsden's letter, declines two posts as clerk and bookseller, and accepts one as teacher.

Lucy Snowe, on the other hand, feels entirely lost:

It cannot be denied that on entering [the coffee-room] I trembled somewhat; felt uncertain, solitary, wretched; wished to Heaven I knew whether I was doing right or wrong; felt convinced it was the last, but could not help myself. Acting in the spirit and with the calm of a fatalist, I sat down at a small table, to which a waiter presently brought me some breakfast; and I partook of that meal in a frame of mind not greatly calculated to favour digestion. There were many other people breakfasting at other tables in the room; I should have felt rather more happy if amongst them all I could have seen any women; however, there was not one—all present were men.²⁴

Lacking Crimsworth's education, Lucy is unable to speak French and is without his confident ease of being a man in a man's world. Crimsworth can walk freely from his hotel to Mr Brown's; Lucy is pursued by two men on her walk to Mme Beck's from the bureau where her coach stops. Here, she has no letter of introduction and, in no position to be able to turn down employment, has to plead to be accepted for the most menial of posts. When Jean Baptiste Vandenhuten nearly drowns, Crimsworth is able to save him—‘I had not been brought up at Eton and boated and bathed and swam there ten long years for nothing; it was a natural and easy act for me to leap to the rescue’ (p. 196)—and thus gain the valuable friendship and patronage of his father, as a woman in his position could not have. Few observations, then, could be further from the mark than the Critic's description of Crimsworth as ‘a Jane Eyre in petticoats’.²⁵ Brontë's words in the Preface—‘I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs’ (p. 3)—are thus fulfilled more literally than she perhaps envisaged: her hero exploits the privileges of his sex as fully as any other.

The most significant suffering in the novel is experienced rather by Frances. Contemporary critics enthused about her as a literary creation (the poet and essayist William Roscoe judges her to be ‘decidedly the most attractive female character that ever came from the pen of this author’,²⁶ Gaskell, ‘the most charming woman she ever drew, and a glimpse of that woman as a mother—very lovely’²⁷) but, as with Crimsworth, saw her as a mere adumbration of later characters. The Dublin University Magazine reads her as ‘a silhouette of the Jane Eyre, afterwards so exquisitely matured’,²⁸Blackwood's, somewhat surprisingly, as ‘a sort of feminine [M.] Paul’.²⁹ Yet Frances is an important character in her own right, both within the text and in terms of Brontë's novelistic development, and of a more ambivalent nature than Victorian critics were willing to concede. The main action in Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette ends, for the most part, with the proposal to the heroine, followed by a brief closing chapter. In The Professor, two long chapters follow the proposal scene, amounting to almost a seventh of the novel, in which Frances becomes the central focus. The implication is that Brontë felt unable to conclude the novel without articulating Frances's own perception of her history and relationship with Crimsworth, and the inclusion of Frances's first-person poem is a part of the attempt to offer a female voice. Brontë defended her first novel throughout her correspondence with Smith, Elder. Rereading it after the publication of Jane Eyre, she wrote to W. S. Williams, ‘I found the beginning very feeble, the whole narrative deficient in incident and general attractiveness. Yet the middle and latter portion of the work, all that relates to Brussels, the Belgian school, etc., is as good as I can write: it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of “Jane Eyre”’,³⁰ and it is in the middle and latter portions of the novel that the interest transfers to Frances.

Crimsworth may share some circumstances and experiences with Frances but again, his sex brings an entirely different perspective to them. He defines himself not as an exile but as an ‘Israelite crawling over the sun-baked fields of Egypt’ (p. 41), with the additional connotations of being a chosen one of God, and he feels liberated in Belgium by the fact that he is a foreigner and without family; Frances finds the same situation restricting and isolating. Crimsworth twice chooses to hand in his notice; Frances is in effect dismissed from Mlle Reuter's. The reader's only means of learning how Frances responds to these events, however, is through the inadequate medium of Crimsworth—through a male consciousness. His method of presenting Frances to the reader mirrors his method of teaching Frances in the schoolroom: ‘motioning to her to rise, I installed myself in her place, allowing her to stand deferentially at my side’ (p. 138); he installs himself in her place as the narrator of her history and the reader's knowledge of the woman by his side is one of his interpretation and editing. It becomes increasingly obvious to the reader that there are complexities in Frances's character and in her relationship with Crimsworth unacknowledged by the novel's narrator. Her first conversation with Hunsden, in which she emerges as vibrant and excited, is to Crimsworth a ‘display of eccentric vigour’ of which he observes, ‘To me, once or twice, she had in intimate conversation, uttered venturous thoughts in nervous language, but when the hour of such manifestation was past, I could not recall it’ (p. 237); it is a side of Frances's personality in which he is uninterested, which he deems to be of no importance. Long before he has any thoughts of marrying Frances, he speculates on the type of wife he will choose:

‘the idea of marrying a doll or a fool was always abhorrent to me; I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool might do well enough for the honey-moon—but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal—nay my idol, to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought or of sympathising with what I felt!’

(p. 108)

He here reveals not only that he is capable of being swept away by passion and marrying purely for beauty, but that he conceives of his wife in terms only of how she can tend to his needs—to his words, thoughts, and feelings.

The most unsettling instance of Crimsworth's narrative silence or lack of curiosity with regard to Frances is his relation of their very wedding day. He comes to her lodgings to accompany her to the church:

Singular to state, she was or had been crying—when I asked her if she were ready she said ‘Yes, Monsieur,’ with something very like a checked sob; and when I took a shawl, which lay on the table, and folded it round her, not only did tear after tear course unbidden down her cheek, but she shook to my ministration like a reed. I said I was sorry to see her in such low spirits and requested to be allowed an insight into the origin thereof. She only said ‘It was impossible to help it,’ and then voluntarily though hurriedly putting her hand into mine, accompanied me out of the room, and ran downstairs with a quick, uncertain step, like one who was eager to get some formidable piece of business over.

(p. 245)

To Crimsworth, it is a ‘singular’ outburst which makes him not anxious or perturbed but ‘sorry’. To the reader, it appears that as much as Frances loves Crimsworth, the decision to marry him, to relinquish her independence perhaps, is by no means an easy one; she has earlier speculated that ‘“if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery”’ (p. 255) and her first request on accepting his marriage proposal is that she may continue to teach. Crimsworth is reluctant to grant this request because to his mind ‘there is something flattering to man's strength, something consonant to his honourable pride in the idea of becoming the Providence of what he loves—feeding and clothing it, as God does the lilies of the field’ (p. 225). The comparison again strikes the reader uneasily, with its suggestion that his love is as much for playing God as it is for Frances. The impression is confirmed by an earlier description of Frances: ‘[one] over whose expression I had such influence; where I could kindle bliss, infuse awe, stir deep delight, rouse sparkling spirit, and sometimes waken pleasurable dread’ (p. 188). The reader may well wonder whether the dread is mutually pleasurable.

While Crimsworth undoubtedly loves Frances, his depictions of her have a static, passionless quality. He terms her ‘my best object of sympathy on earth’, ‘my ideal of the shrine in which to seal my stores of love’, ‘silent possessor of … those sources of refreshment and comfort to the sanctuary of home’ (pp. 168-9); more bizarrely and disturbingly, he describes her after their first embrace as being ‘as stirless in her happiness, as a mouse in its terror’ (p. 224). The image, together with that of her as being ‘docile as a well-trained child’ (p. 247) and his admission that when Mlle Reuter steals about him ‘with the soft steps of a slave’ he feels at once ‘barbarous and sensual as a pasha’ (p. 184), suggests a desire in Crimsworth for mastery. Brontë, however, allows the reader to discern the inadequacy of such descriptions and that Frances, even after they are married, has an independence from Crimsworth's conception of her. When Crimsworth jokingly concedes, in reference to Frances's roles as directress and wife, ‘I seemed to possess two wives’ (p. 250), his words have a greater pertinence than he realizes.

Crimsworth's autobiography could be read as an attempt to create a new self, to write as he would wish to be perceived: as a man who is independent, determined, courageous under affliction, firm in love. He alleges, ‘Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real Life—if they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture—still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair’ (p. 159). In complying to this doctrine, he attempts to reduce his story to a uniform sameness, passing over or ignoring ‘light and shade’, dwelling on the grey of what he deems ‘real Life’. The result is that the reader is aware of two stories: the history Crimsworth openly narrates, and that which he endeavours to conceal or of which he is unaware—his insecurity, his jealousy of Hunsden, his limited comprehension of Frances. That Brontë did not intend Crimsworth to be an entirely sympathetic character is confirmed in references to the novel in her correspondence. When George Smith, although unwilling to publish the work, offered to keep the manuscript in London for safe-keeping, Brontë refused:

You kindly propose to take The Professor into custody. Ah, no! … Perhaps with slips of him you might light an occasional cigar, or you might remember to lose him some day … No, I have put him by and locked him up, not indeed in my desk, where I could not tolerate the monotony of his demure Quaker countenance, but in a cupboard by himself.³¹

If Frances's apprehensions about marriage are apparent in the sobs on her wedding morning, Crimsworth's make a still stranger manifestation. His marriage proposal having been accepted by Frances, he returns home only to be tormented by hypochondria for ten days. He attempts to rationalize the incident to the reader: ‘Man is ever clogged with his Mortality and it was my mortal nature which now faltered and plained; my nerves which jarred and gave a false sound, because the soul, of late rushing headlong to an aim, had overstrained the body's comparative weakness’ (p. 228); but the abstract, impersonal language strikes the reader as an unconvincing explanation of such an intensely physical attack. Similarly, he uses biblical allusions, such as ‘A horror of great darkness fell upon me’ (p. 228)—echoing Genesis 15: 12—as a convenient means of relaying his state of mind without having to enter into a detailed analysis of his psyche. Far more telling is his relation of the seizures, which he characterizes as a relationship with a lover:

I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, shewing me nooks … where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me … taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me, at such hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would discourse to me of her own Country—The Grave—and again and again promise to conduct me there erelong; and drawing me to the very brink of a black, sullen river, shew me on the other side, shores unequal with mound, monument and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight. ‘Necropolis!’ she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add ‘It contains a mansion prepared for you’.

(p. 228)

The images betray at once disgust and attraction: he goes on to repulse her ‘as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband's heart towards his young bride’ (p. 229). Although he has earlier referred to Frances as a ‘novice in the art of kissing’ (p. 226), he provides no evidence that he is any less of a novice himself. The novel marks his progress from a dismissal of an ‘Oriental’ homage to beauty (p. 13) to the confession, ‘It appeared then, that I too was a sensualist, in my temperate and fastidious way’ (p. 227). Crimsworth, accustomed to being the ‘maître’ in the relationship, must now come to terms with the fact that it is Frances who awakens the sensualist in him, who could be perceived as an object of fear as well as desire. All that can be deduced from the incident is that for Crimsworth, as for Frances, the prospect of marriage is more unsettling than he is willing to acknowledge. Moglen comments, ‘The illness which lasts for two weeks is similar to the ordeals later endured by Jane Eyre, Carolyn [sic] Helstone, and Lucy Snowe. For all, recovery marks a psychic rebirth: an entry into a new life.’³² I would argue that although Crimsworth may become a husband, father, and the director of a school, it is one of the many curious aspects of the attack that there is no ‘psychic rebirth’, barely any psychic change; for the remainder of the novel, he is as aloof, as self-absorbed, as unperceptive as ever.

It was presumably the inclusion of such disquieting scenes and biblical allusions in the novel which led to Gaskell's misgivings: ‘It is … disfigured by more coarseness,—& profanity in quoting texts of Scripture disagreeably than in any of her other works.’³³ Each of Brontë's novels was the victim of such accusations and even The Professor did not entirely escape; the Press held its language to be ‘very good, though at times tainted with that coarseness which disfigured Miss Brontë's later works’.³⁴ But such censures were very much an exception. The Christian Remembrancer remained sceptical of Brontë's Christian faith even after reading the biography—‘her character was essentially unspiritual’³⁵—but now that Brontë was known to have had a life punctuated by tragedy, now, more especially, that she was known to be both the daughter and the wife of a clergyman, every effort was made by the critical establishment to portray her in as favourable, even saintly, a light as possible. Any defects in the morality of The Professor were whitewashed or resolutely ignored. The Saturday Review uses the novel to defend Brontë against the charge of coarseness:

The Professor also shows that … Miss Brontë owed to her residence in Belgium a very peculiar view of the relations of the sexes. She states, as distinctly as words enable her to state, that she found thoughts current among women of all ages in Belgium, which were strange, repulsive, and unknown to an English girl … The Professor is fuller than any of her other tales, of passages which show she was aware of this material side of love. We wish not to be misunderstood. There is not an expression or allusion that a prude could call indelicate, but there are traces, faint but unmistakeable, of a knowledge into which, happily for themselves and their country, Englishwomen are seldom initiated. We cannot doubt that Miss Bronté derived an instruction which to a less noble, unstained, and devotional mind might have been perilous, from her residence in a foreign school …³⁶

Yet for all the new idolization of Brontë, the problem remained of reconciling her novels with the noble, unstained, and devotional character now attributed to her. Women and girls may have been encouraged to emulate Brontë's life but it by no means followed that they were encouraged to read her works. Parental censorship prevailed. The daughter of the author Elizabeth Malleson, for example, remembers being read to as a child in the 1860s: ‘Our mother was a past-master in the art of skipping as she read without pause or loss of continuity anything unsuitable to our youthful ears. I remember she read us Jane Eyre from beginning to end entirely omitting Rochester's mad wife, and so skilfully that we noticed nothing amiss with the plot.’³⁷ Quite some feat. In all the hagiographic accounts of Brontë's life, therefore, remarkably little mention is made of her novels, the very reason for her celebrity. Heroines of Our Time alone alludes to the incongruity: ‘we have learnt to love her more than her books.’³⁸

The Brontë legend, then, arose with astonishing rapidity, based solely on the revelations of the Life. Appearing just four months after the biography, The Professor received the full force of the change in the critical heart. In 1853 the Dublin Review was by no means alone in considering the author of Villette an ‘unpleasing and unamiable writer’;³⁹ in 1857 the Eclectic Review has as much support in regarding The Professor as a ‘legacy of Charlotte Brontë's genius’ which will ‘confirm the general admiration of her extraordinary powers’,⁴⁰ the same powers which, after reading all four novels, have the critic and essayist Badeau bowing to ‘the mysterious supremacy of genius’ and crying out ‘“This is the finger of God”’.⁴¹ Victorian critics, keen to reappraise Brontë, chose to forget that Brontë was a writer and not a saint—a writer, moreover, of novels with problematic characters, problematic endings, and which raised problematic questions. To many modern critics, The Professor is of interest only when read in conjunction with Villette. The nineteenth-century eulogies may be exaggerated but the twentieth-century indifference is surely unwarranted. Something of a balance is found in the American and perhaps more objective assessment by Harper's New Monthly Magazine: ‘As a preliminary study for the composition of Jane Eyre and Villette, it is full of interest, and in itself possesses attractions to the lover of acute psychological analysis far superior to the majority of English novels.’⁴²

Notes

1. ‘The Professor’, Saturday Review (13 June 1857), 549-50 (p. 549). All reviews are anonymous, unless otherwise stated.

2. ‘The Last New Novel’, Mirror, 2 (1847), 376-80 (p. 377).

3. ‘The Caxtons’, English Review, 12 (1849), 306-7 (p. 307).

4. H. R. Bagshawe, ‘Jane Eyre and Shirley’, Dublin Review, 28 (1850), 209-33 (pp. 210-11).

5. ‘The License of Modern Novelists’, Edinburgh Review, 106 (1857), 124-56 (p. 153).

6. ‘Contemporary Literature’, Westminster Review, 68 (1857), 235-314 (p. 295). Attributed in the Wellesley Index to Harriet Martineau, but disputed in Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters, ed. V. Sanders (Oxford, 1990), 144.

7. Anon, Women of Worth: A Book for Girls (London, 1859), 30.

8. There is, however, a comparative scarcity of known reviews of The Professor. Friends and Smith, Elder sent reviews to Brontë of the three novels published in her lifetime and she duly wrote to thank them, mentioning each notice by name. With The Professor, this source is obviously eliminated and the correspondence of Patrick Brontë, Ellen Nussey, and Elizabeth Gaskell all fail to give reviews the same careful scrupulous attention. Allott's Critical Heritage of the Brontës, for example, contains only four reviews; I refer to sixteen.

9. ‘Charlotte Brontë’, Eclectic Review, ns 1 (1857), 630-42 (p. 630).

10. ‘The Life of Charlotte Brontë’, British Quarterly Review, 26 (1857), 218-31 (p. 218).

11. ‘Novels of the Season’, Eclectic Review, ns 2 (1857), 54-66 (p. 64).

12. ‘The Professor’, Critic (15 June 1857), 271-2 (p. 271).

13. R. H. Hutton, ‘Novels by the Authoress of “John Halifax”’, North British Review, 29 (1858), 466-81 (p. 474).

14. ‘The Professor’, Examiner (20 June 1857), 388.

15. M. J. Sweat, ‘Charlotte Bronté and the Bronté Novels’, North American Review, 85 (1857), 293-329 (p. 326).

16. ‘New Novels’, Press (13 June 1857), 584.

17. ‘The Professor’, Athenaeum (13 June 1857), 755-7 (p. 755).

18. Repr. in Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ed. M. Smith and H. Rosengarten (Oxford, 1987), 295. All page references are to this edition and will hereafter be cited in the text.

19. Critic, 272.

20. ‘The Professor’, Literary Gazette (20 June 1857), 584-7 (p. 585).

21. Press, 584.

22. Letter to James Taylor, 1 Mar. 1849 (T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (edd.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (4 vols., Oxford, 1932; repr. in 2 vols., 1980); ii. 312—refs. are to part nos. of the 1980 edn.).

23. ‘The Professor’, Economist (27 June 1857), 701-3 (p. 701).

24. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. H. Rosengarten and M. Smith (Oxford, 1984), 80.

25. Critic, 271.

26. W. C. Roscoe, ‘Miss Brontë’, National Review, 5 (1857), 127-64 (pp. 161-2).

27. Letter to Emily Shaen, 7-8 Sept. 1856 (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (Manchester, 1966), 409-10).

28. S. A. Brooke, ‘Currer Bell's “The Professor”’, Dublin University Magazine, 50 (1857), 88-100 (p. 97).

29. E. S. Dallas, ‘Currer Bell’, Blackwood's Magazine, 82 (1857), 77-94 (p. 91).

30. Letter, 14 Dec. 1847 (Wise and Symington (edd.), The Brontës, ii. 161).

31. Letter, 5 Feb. 1851 (Wise and Symington (edd.), The Brontës, iii. 207).

32. H. Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York, 1976), 96.

33. Letter to Emily Shaen, 7-8 Sept. 1856 (Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. Chapple and Pollard, 409-10).

34. Press, 584.

35. ‘The Life of Charlotte Brontë’, Christian Remembrancer, 34 (1857), 87-145 (p. 91).

36. Saturday Review, 550.

37. H. Malleson, Elizabeth Malleson 1828-1916: Autobiographical Notes and Letters (printed for private circulation, 1926), 90.

38. J. Johnson, Heroines of Our Time (London, 1860), 105.

39. C. W. Russell, ‘The Novels of 1853’, Dublin Review, 34 (1853), 174-203 (p. 191).

40. Eclectic Review, ns 2, 64.

41. A. Badeau, The Vagabond (New York, 1859), 165.

42. ‘Literary Notices’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 15 (1857), 404–5 (p. 404).