[In the following essay, Rodolff discusses Brontë's move from the masculine narrator in The Professor to the feminine narrator in Jane Eyre, and focuses on the last two chapters of The Professor as the source of this transition.]

Charlotte Brontë owed her facility in Jane Eyre to practice as well as to genius. Her Angria stories, written mostly in the 1830s, provided an extensive training in the art of fiction: the young author acquired technical skills and a serviceable store of subject matter by writing again and again about the same, and similar, Angrian characters, and by sometimes retelling the same stories with variations.¹ Moreover, in 1846 she completed a one-volume novel, The Professor (posthumously published in 1857). This “was a necessary stage” in the author's development, for it originated, as Kathleen Tillotson remarks, the use of “a bare framework of ‘working one's way through life’ with a ‘rational mind.’”² Nevertheless, while the less disgressive structure and the grounding of the hero's story in Brussels put The Professor into a category different from that of the juvenilia, it yet remains an apprentice work in important respects.³ For example, the Angria story of rival brothers that opens the novel is a curtain raiser rather than an integral part of the whole. And the male narrator, established during this episode as kin to a line of self-conscious, satirical Angrians,⁴ continues throughout the novel to have two functions: like all her narrators, William Crimsworth is a partial projection of Charlotte Brontë's own feminine sensibility, and, like all her heroes, he asserts defiantly, even gratuitously, his masculinity.

Now Jane Eyre, begun only two months after the fair copy of The Professor was completed,⁵ does not use the masculine point of view; and it shows a coherent structuring of plot and theme. Professor Tillotson suggests that these changes may owe a debt to Anne's Agnes Grey, with its female narrator telling a simple tale, and to Emily's passionate, intricately structured Wuthering Heights.⁶ At the very least, their example would have exposed Charlotte's need for clarity in construction and in the use of point of view. But I want to show that her own first novel contributed similarly and still more importantly. The idea of the subject of Jane Eyre and of the feminine point of view—the idea, in short, of entering the soul of a retiring but inwardly passionate woman struggling for social independence and emotional fulfillment—was most likely grasped in the act of writing the end of The Professor. For the end of this novel can be shown to anticipate these as well as other ideas elaborated in Jane Eyre.

This is not to forget that there are many parallels between the whole of The Professor and the whole of Jane Eyre, just as there are many parallels between any two of Charlotte Brontë's novels (quite apart from all the parallels with the Angria works). Noticeable, for example, is a structure managed with varying authority but common to all four novels: a sort of prologue is succeeded by a love story having two main parts. The Professor has an English prologue followed by the story of Crimsworth's relations with Zoraīde Reuter, and the story of his relations with Frances Henri; Jane Eyre's childhood memories are followed by the story of her relations first with Rochester, then with St. John. Shirley (which exploits the mobility of the third-person narrator) begins with the three curates and goes on to set out the story of Caroline Helstone and then, in the second volume, to interweave the story of Shirley. In Villette an English prologue prepares the ground for the main story of Lucy Snowe's relations first with Dr. John and then with M. Paul.

This common over-all pattern points up, however, a way in which The Professor differs. For noticeable too is how abruptly Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette come to a stop with proposals: in Shirley, with its two heroines, a proposal in the penultimate chapter and a second proposal in the final chapter are followed by a mere one-page epilogue, while in the autobiographies a proposal in the penultimate chapter is followed by a very short, three- or four-page “Conclusion” or “Finis.” No new material which would call for explanation is introduced. By contrast, in The Professor two very long chapters, comprising about one-seventh of the novel, come after the proposal scene.⁷ And new material is exactly what is introduced and developed here: in Chapter XXIV the professor's fiancée Frances encounters an appreciative Rochester-type, Yorke Hunsden; and in the final chapter the professor describes married life with Frances, her eventual success as the director of a school, and their retirement in England as Hunsden's neighbors. The basic two-part story, confirmed by Jane Eyre and the other novels as the typical narrative structure of Charlotte Brontë's mature work, emerges twice in The Professor.

I shall be making two points. First, that Charlotte Brontë concludes the professor's story in the proposal scene, shifts the interest from the male narrator to the heroine, and then repeats the basic story of a principal character relating to two members of the opposite sex:⁸ the Frances section constitutes a distinct story intermediate between those of Crimsworth and Jane Eyre. And second that, brief though it is, this feminine variation of the professor's story contains in embryo many of the elements developed at greater length in the novel that she began writing just a few weeks later: it specifically anticipates that use of plot, character, and theme which characterizes Jane Eyre.

In the opening chapters of The Professor William Crimsworth rises against and then escapes from an older, oppressing brother. Crimsworth then begins life anew in Brussels as an English teacher at a boys' school. Here he is so successful that Mlle Reuter engages him for the afternoons at her next-door girls' school. Now Jane Eyre also rises against a tyrannical relation; and she also later moves out of sexual isolation when she begins life anew under, not just Mrs. Fairfax (whom she at first supposes her employer), but Edward Rochester. Crimsworth and Jane are attracted, respectively, to the formidable, unconventional Mlle Reuter and Mr. Rochester. These latter are, in turn, intrigued by the discovery of the secret sensitivity and pride of the tutor and governess—so much so that Zoraīde Reuter spies on Crimsworth and Rochester spies on Jane. However, because in The Professor the author was anxious to establish the strength and masculinity of her male character, Crimsworth's inner nature, “the jewel within”⁹ sought by Zoraīde's probing fingers, remains inviolable and consequently mysterious. The novel's treatment reveals no approval of a woman's spying on a man. More acceptable to Charlotte Brontë's imagination is, evidently, a man's spying on a woman. Indeed, Crimsworth closely observes Mlle Reuter and, later, Frances Henri. Jane Eyre further sanctions such scrutiny by adopting the point of view of the woman who accepts inspection.

The main points of resemblance between The Professor and Jane Eyre depend then on the narrators' common experience of oppression, while the differences depend on the reactions and defences available to each sex. Charlotte Brontë creates in the narrator Crimsworth—who re-enacts fictionally some of her personal experiences—a sensitivity and vulnerability to an oppressive society. Yet by virtue of the conventions of this very society and by virtue of a set of quite different, tougher character traits, he, as a man, easily overcomes his individual experiences of oppression (or threatened oppression). Even the unobstructed narrative line reflects the professor's greater ease in making his way, asserting his independence, and taking possession, in his own time, of the right mate. The man who succeeds with relative ease in his efforts to assert himself in his relations with a series of aggressive, morally inferior characters has still less difficulty in being regarded with respect and love by Frances. Crimsworth does not experience in his love life that active relationship, based on moral conflict, that will lend interest and urgency to Jane's relations with Rochester. In Jane Eyre, the plot and theme develop complexity because of Jane's evident moral superiority to her “Master.” But in The Professor the narrator's struggle for ascendancy simply does not involve Frances.

Moreover, Frances is not only a passive foil to his success story; she is at this point relatively undeveloped. This in itself heightens the plausibility of her docility, as no possible reason for conflict is made available. The presentation of Frances at first (Chs. XIII-XVI) consists largely in her short answers to the professor's “abrupt” questions and in his efforts to interpret her character by observing her behavior. Her devoirs, it is true, serve as revelations to him (and so to us); yet we still learn little about Frances, for, though her essays indicate imaginative powers, they are otherwise impersonal. Finally, our introduction to the heroine is cut short in Chapter XVIII: not only does Crimsworth switch to summarizing their subsequent relations, but, just when Frances has “wakened to life” under her master's appreciation, Mlle Reuter dismisses her, and she retires from the story.

Like Crimsworth, then, we do not know much about Frances's inner life. Still, as a character of worth, she has become a perfect reward for the hero's perspicacity and prudence. Furthermore, union with her suggests the closure not only of his relations with Frances but also of his more active relations, for it indicates the confounding of Zoraīde, who would like to distract Crimsworth from his love, and the confounding of Hunsden, who supposes him destitute of love. Winning Frances satisfies the hero's emotional needs and completes the novel's story of his struggle in the world. It is for this reason, and because of the novel's theme and its very conservative, conventional presentation of masculine dominance, that it is unsatisfactory that any new development in the Crimsworth-Frances relationship takes place—least of all one which removes the interest from the young hero to the young, hitherto subordinate, heroine as a center of conflict and struggle.

Yet this is what happens. And this is the odder since, at the start of Chapter XXIII, Charlotte Brontë quickens the claims of Crimsworth upon our sympathy: she shows him, despite his handsome competency, in a state of “feverish” anxiety. And the author's involvement with the hero is signalled by her recourse to images (e.g., of eating inedibles, of wind and shipwreck) typically associated in the novels with her central characters in moments of strong emotion.¹⁰ Indeed Crimsworth's situation has telling points of resemblance to the inspirational denouement of Jane Eyre. Like Jane before setting out to find Rochester, he spends the remaining hours walking about his room. Like Jane, he arrives possessed of independence, and is encouraged by the providential hearing of the loved one's voice. While Crimsworth stands at Frances's door, “a voice rewarded the attention of [his] strained ear”; he overhears Frances pour out her heart to her empty room. Up to this point, a point suggestive of an imminent winding-up, the professor remains not only the novel's chief consciousness, but very much the central protagonist.

But from this point on, Frances becomes the more central and more interesting character. Now it is Frances who enacts the Brontëan habit of pacing “backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.” She is reciting a poem that, we believe with Crimsworth, expresses “the language of her own heart.” And this poem, “Master and Pupil,” probably written in 1843 in Brussels, also expresses the novelist's heart.¹¹ Charlotte Brontë's interest strays from the satisfied male narrator to the projection of herself in the still yearning, and feminine, “Pupil.” She contrives to give Frances's point of view. When Crimsworth asks himself the question “what had she to do with love?” (asked in later novels by the heroines of themselves, e.g., Jane Eyre, Ch. XVI, and Shirley, Ch. X), the answer, supposed to emanate from Frances, requires some circumlocution and, in the last couple of sentences, some help from the feminine author:

“Nothing,” was the answer of her own sad, though gentle countenance; it seemed to say, “I must cultivate fortitude and cling to poetry; one is to be my support and the other my solace through life. Human affections do not bloom, nor do human passions glow for me.” Other women have such thoughts. Frances, had she been as desolate as she deemed, would not have been worse off than thousands of her sex.

Moreover, it is Frances's heart, not Crimsworth's, that speaks, this time directly, in the poem. The poem has as its narrator a girl called “Jane” who must part from her beloved Master. Saying farewell to him in his room, she is passionately “snatched” by him. He murmurs “‘Why will they part us, Jane?’” and at the poem's end declaims:

“They call again; leave then my breast;
          Quit thy true shelter, Jane;
But when deceived, repulsed, opprest,
          Come home to me again!”

Charlotte Brontë had, evidently, a special fondness for the name Jane. It was her favorite sister Emily's second name—and when given to Angrian characters it was associated with Emily.¹² It was a name that was likely to define a character, carrying with it well-established associations (associations seen in the teasing, yet authoritative disposition of the Angrian Jane Moore). Here, whether the name “Jane” induced associations with a jealously-loved sister or whether the poem simply induced a more personal identification with the heroine, Frances is metamorphosed.

In effect, a new novel, or rather an idea for a novel, originates. Even the need for a female narrator is intimated by the inclusion of the poem. Though Crimsworth necessarily continues as the observer, Charlotte Brontë takes as her subject a woman's “wakening to life.” Now it is Frances more than Crimsworth who evinces the qualities and actions common to the author's personas. Like the Jane of the next novel, Frances indirectly invites a proposal from her Master. Crimsworth identifies Jane and the Master: “‘Jane’ was now at my side: no child, but a girl of nineteen; and she might be mine … the frost of the Master's manner might melt.” He looks up to see that, “slight, straight, and elegant, she stood erect on the hearth.” (Cf. Jane, who “stood erect before” Rochester when he proposed, Ch. XXIII, and “rose up and stood before” St. John during his proposal, Ch. XXXIV.) The next moment Crimsworth fulfills the dream of Frances's poem by “snatching” her: he holds her on his knee, “placed there with sharpness and decision, and retained with exceeding tenacity.” Three times the agitated professor asks, “‘Frances, how much regard have you for me?,’” at first holding her hand “in a somewhat ruthless grasp.” (Cf. the proposal scene in the penultimate chapter of Jane Eyre where the heroine, also on her lover's knee, reports: “he retained me by a firmer grasp than ever.”)

Frances's responses articulate her change. When Crimsworth asks her, more plainly, to marry him, she first blushes, then stalls in answering, rephrasing his proposal, giving it definition: “‘Monsieur désire savoir si je consens—si—enfin, si je veux me marier avec lui?’” Then from hesitant cross-questioning she switches to confident teasing: Crimsworth remarks that a different Frances goes on “with a new, yet still subdued inflection of the voice—an inflection which provoked while it pleased me. … ‘C'est à dire, Monsieur sera toujours un peu entêté, exigeant, volontaire—.’” Finally, pressed to give an answer (and to give it in English, which naturally curbs her new expressiveness), she ruminates, “‘I like to be near you; I believe you are very good, and very superior. …’” Then “she made a sort of movement, as if she would have clung to me, but restraining herself she only added with earnest emphasis—‘Master, I consent to pass my life with you.’” Her “restrained” answer receives wonderfully restrained acceptance: “‘Very well, Frances.’” Charlotte Brontë uncovers a playful heroine who quizzes her master, but, perhaps because she is still at pains to maintain the narrator's masterfulness, the characters remain, very self-consciously, the master and pupil together.

Crimsworth, who as narrator must dwell upon his own manliness, lacks the natural spirited personality of Rochester. Nevertheless, Crimsworth is not a dull novel-character. It is because of the male narrator that The Professor lacks emotional force, but it is also why the novel is more comic than her mature work. Humor and irony pervade the narrator's description of his own forcefulness. He presents his youthful self, after Frances has accepted him, as blissfully content—and blissfully unaware of his betrothed's less complete contentment.

Frances' thoughts, during this interval, I know not, nor did I attempt to guess them; I was not occupied in searching her countenance, nor in otherwise troubling her composure. The peace I felt, I wished her to feel; my arm, it is true, still detained her; but with a restraint that was gentle enough, so long as no opposition tightened it. My gaze was on the red fire; my heart was measuring its own content; it sounded and sounded, and found the depth fathomless.

“Monsieur,” at last said my quiet companion, as stirless in her happiness as a mouse in its terror. Even now in speaking she scarcely lifted her head.

“Well, Frances?”

The knowing narrator deprives his young self of much of the reader's sympathy by describing his lack of interest in his beloved's thoughts; his complacent possessiveness and sense of being master (“my arm, it is true, still detained her”); his willingness to compare Frances in her happiness to “a mouse in its terror”; and his cool response (he goes on to tell us in a typical understatement, “it is not my way to overpower with amorous epithets”!). The passage serves both to draw humor out of Crimsworth's misconceptions and to prepare for a dramatic effect, for it increases our surprise when Frances, after having quietly, repeatedly addressed “Monsieur,” finally works herself into expressing thoughts that do not at all suggest a being so contented as the innocent professor would have.

Frances announces a determination to be “‘no incumbrance.’” Crimsworth, who does not understand that self-respect dictates her desire “‘to get on’” (as she calls it), thinks to remove this desire by breaking the news of his own very lucrative teaching position. To us he admits, with almost disarming candor, the “flattering” satisfaction he experiences “in the idea of becoming the providence of what he loves—feeding and clothing it, as God does the lilies of the field.” Crimsworth appears to be playing God rather more complacently and unattractively than Rochester, who, seen through Jane's eyes, gloats in a spirit of fun.¹³ But Charlotte Brontë manages, even without the feminine point of view, to suggest that the man's anticipation of dominance is a delusion. When “Frances seemed to consider” his proposal that she stop working, he tells her, “to decide her resolution,” that she “‘require[s] complete rest.’” Crimsworth's concern, however, is undercut ironically by the commentary. He confesses: “I am not sure whether Frances had accorded due attention to my harangue …”; she does not answer “with her usual respectful promptitude.” And indeed Frances's respect does not extend to recognizing her master as a “God” with a right to feed and clothe her and to be mindlessly obeyed. What is more, it transpires that she has not even been considering giving up work: she has been brooding on the discrepancy between his earning power and hers!

Frances gives in not to his argument but to the fact that the inequality “‘must be so for the present.’” Crimsworth's superiority, established throughout the novel in his encounters with other characters and at last socially recognized by professional success, is humorously undermined. We discover that Frances is ambitious, in common with such other retiring Charlotte Brontë-types as Crimsworth himself and the Jane of her poem: “The strong pulse of Ambition struck / In every vein I owned.” Now it is the heroine's superiority that we look forward to seeing asserted. Charlotte Brontë commits herself to continuing the novel. First, because Frances, as a character with ambitions, demands a professional future. Second, because Crimsworth's misunderstanding of Frances suggests a conflict in their personal relations which did not formerly exist.

The positions of Frances and Crimsworth, and their relationship, approach those of Jane and Rochester. However, in Jane Eyre the use of a female narrator allows sympathy with the spying, possessive male as well as with the heroine, because the heroine, whose point of view we share, views him with love and tolerance. Rochester's attitude to Jane is exonerated since, as viewed by Jane, his love is convincingly passionate (and since it is complicated by the existence of a mad wife). In The Professor the misunderstood heroine's point of view is usually indirectly conveyed, and by a use of irony that distances us from the imperceptive narrator. Nor can Crimsworth's sexual relationship to Frances temper this effect, for his sexuality has to this point been inadequately realized. Neither romantic nor sexual passion is a part of Crimsworth's background: there are no Célines or Claras, and we may wonder, when he calls Frances “a novice in the art of kissing,” how it can be that he is not one himself.¹⁴

According to the text, only now do the physical charms making Frances a traditionally worthy object of affection become apparent to him. When Crimsworth looks at his “little lace-mender” after her successful suit to continue teaching, he feels “that she was singularly changed for me”; and he discovers, as he says, “that I too was a sensualist, in my temperate and fastidious way.” Now that Frances has asserted her independence, has shown a disposition to coax and tease, and has become physically more attractive to him, she is altogether more formidable. The professor has to reckon with her personality, her passions, and her ambitions, as the sequel will illustrate. The tension that Charlotte Brontë has thus injected produces an immediate and extraordinary effect. “A horror of great darkness fell upon me,” Crimsworth confesses; and he wonders why, “now, when my course was widening, my purpose brightening; when my affections had found a rest … why did hypochondria accost me now?” The answer evidently lies in his discoveries of a new Frances and of himself as “a sensualist.”¹⁵ However, this ordeal of hypochondria is a reaction better suited to such other authorial types as Jane, Caroline, and Lucy, whose sexuality is more credibly troubled, because of the social background, by inhibitions or by the possibility of losing personal independence in giving of the self. Crimsworth has claimed, even if unconvincingly, the prerogative of a man of the time, boldly outstaring women and controlling them. Again the difficulty is that Crimsworth is the novel's romantic hero as well as the first-person vehicle for the author's literary stock of feminine anxieties.

Though in the proposal chapter the narrative draws to a happy ending (an ending normal moreover to Charlotte Brontë's other novels), a new narrative goal, based on Frances, has emerged. The new evidence of her inner life occasions the need in the story for a man sexually interested in her and for a man in conflict with her. Initially, Crimsworth takes this part, but he takes it uneasily, as we have seen. Then in the penultimate chapter the return of Crimsworth's eccentric opposite Yorke Hunsden provides a more workable foil to the heroine. In the last two chapters Frances proves herself by relating to Hunsden as well as to Crimsworth (just as Crimsworth has related to Zoraīde as well as to Frances, and as Jane will relate to St. John as well as to Rochester).

The extent of Charlotte Brontë's absorption in the possibilities of Frances's position is thus reflected not just in her continuing a novel by introducing new character traits and new narrative goals but also by her giving to this brief exposition the two-part structure characterizing all her novels. The introduction of a second admiring man confirms Frances's attractiveness, draws out further aspects of her personality, and complicates her relations with the first man. However, in Jane Eyre, for example, St. John and Rochester are clearly different types, just as, in The Professor, Zoraīde and Frances are different. But the author is not free, in her first novel, to present men from an outsider's viewpoint; it seems that when the inner self she projects is putatively that of a man, she is limited by the conception of “man” that this entails. So Hunsden is a figure exaggerating the narrator's own nature: Crimsworth's and Hunsden's boyish persiflage and gratuitous displays of manliness vie with their express femininity. True, Hunsden is established as more of an individual and a man of the world than Crimsworth; and we are more conscious of the obtruded trappings of manliness, e.g., his cigar and “impertinent” (Ch. III), unconventional speech. Still, the substitution of Hunsden for Crimsworth as a foil to Frances's ensuing development is sanctioned by the mysterious kinship of the men's personalities.

In the prologue this kinship manifests itself in their success at reading each other's thoughts and feelings. Now in Chapter XXIV, when Hunsden, back in Brussels, walks by and “grimaces,” Crimsworth can interpret the communication as, on the one hand, “‘So you have found your counterpart at last; there she sits, the female of your kind!’” and, on the other, a promise to call on him soon. The professor's inference is not mistaken. But Hunsden seems potentially isolated from Crimsworth by his (rather belabored) inability to assess Crimsworth's “counterpart.” First, he supposes her to be Mlle Reuter. Then, when Crimsworth reveals her “caste,” he jumps to the conclusion that the girl must be unrefined. Finally, when they ascend the stairs to Frances's lodging, Hunsden's move to continue on up shows plainly enough, as the professor notes with amusement, that “his mind was bent on the attics.” We enjoy each blunder. Knowing something of Frances's worth, we anticipate with pleasure a repetition, in the triumph of her quiet dignity over Hunsden's rash surmises, of her relations with Crimsworth.

Crimsworth withdraws from the action to observe Frances captivate, in lively discourse, her sardonic visitor. And Frances matched with the worldly, difficult Hunsden elicits from the author not only a more vigorous heroine but a relationship that looks forward to the sparring of Jane and Rochester. In particular, Hunsden's discovery of Frances's qualities in social conversation parallels Rochester's discovery of Jane—and more closely than it parallels Crimsworth's discovery of Frances in the classroom. This is partly because Crimsworth described his attraction to Frances—but also because he was attracted to a less complex Frances; one who never argued with him as she does with her new acquaintance, and one who spoke very little before the proposal scene. The awakening, described generally in Chapter XVIII and illustrated in the proposal scene, is now repeated with Hunsden in the professor's role. “Animated by degrees, she began to change, just as a grave night-sky changes at the approach of sunrise. …” And though Frances and Hunsden are not lovers, Hunsden's reaction to her “fire” puts Crimsworth in mind of “a snake waking from torpor, as he erected his tall form, reared his head, before a little declined, and putting back his hair from his broad Saxon forehead, showed unshaded the gleam of almost savage satire.” (When, early in their acquaintance, Jane roused Rochester by her “brusque” denial of his good looks, he too “lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow” [Ch. XIV].) Hunsden, unlike his friend, is protected from loving Frances by this tendency to wax satirical; still, sexual interest is yet suggested here, and “caste” is explicitly forgotten: “he was himself as Frances was herself.” He is like Rochester, who is himself with Jane, claiming only the superiority of age and experience—though indeed Jane disallows even those claims. Rochester admires her bold replies, as he admires her disbelief that anyone “free-born would submit to [insolence], even for a salary”—though he disallows her “accuracy” (Ch. XIV). But then Jane and Rochester often disagree; argument lends a certain piquancy to their relations that is much appreciated by both. In The Professor this sparring relationship founded on mutual respect is sketched in the conversation of Frances and Hunsden. If he is “savagely satirical,” he is also intrigued and admiring. He admires her for the “uncompromising” way she enunciates the word “hell,” and is as stimulated and refreshed by her unconventionality as Rochester is by Jane's. “He liked something strong, whether in man or woman; he liked whatever dared to clear conventional limits.” Though the heroine is not the narrator, she has become the central character, and, as in the next novel, the man's discovery of the heroine is observed, not communicated from his own point of view.

However, though the possibilities are outlined, this revelation of unconventionality and of strong independence of mind is not turned to any interesting structural use. Since Frances and Hunsden are not lovers, no conflict of passion and reason occurs, as it does in Jane Eyre, which affects the personal lives of the disputants. We see in Hunsden “a wish that some one did love him as he would like to be loved—some one whose love he could unreservedly return,” but this becomes no more than a part of the characterization of the “inscrutable Hunsden.” Similarly, their argument about the relative importance of logic and feeling is merely aired.¹⁶ Nevertheless, here too the fact that Frances debates with great “feeling” but without, as Hunsden attests, any “logic,” solidifies her Jane Eyrish qualities. We can hear Jane's voice in Frances's insistence that, even when logic tells against her she would, if her “‘opinion really differed from [Hunsden's] … adhere to it when I had not another word to say in its defence; you should be baffled by dumb determination.’” Hunsden recognizes the accuracy of her self-analysis just as Rochester will recognize, but with a lover's trepidation, Jane's stubborn capacity to adhere to what she has determined upon as right and owing to herself. In Jane Eyre, in other words, the author purposefully works towards and integrates the conflict of the two characters. In The Professor the exchange is an indication of the character-types and situations now claiming the author's interest.

In sum, then, Charlotte Brontë coalesces the Crimsworth-Hunsden and Crimsworth-Frances relationships in the penultimate chapter: the two parts Crimsworth has assumed elsewhere in the novel are taken on the one hand by Frances and on the other by Hunsden. These latter relate to each other instead of to the narrator. Yet, at the same time, Hunsden's position as Crimsworth's alter-ego¹⁷ is prominently featured and Hunsden even becomes an appropriate lover for Frances. A sort of inter-changeability of the two men is realized in the penultimate chapter by means of their relationship with Frances.

Thus, when Hunsden's abuse of Switzerland provokes Frances to warn him off marrying a Swiss—for “‘your mountain maid will some night smother her Breton-bretonnat, even as your own Shakespeare's Othello smothered Desdemona’”—Hunsden parries her thrust by proposing Crimsworth's “‘being in my nightcap.’” This doubling of the men in the role, though not very remarkable taken on its own, carries weight by virtue of the yet more curious passage to follow. Out in the street Hunsden collars his friend and they “grapple” together after the manner of other literary doubles, if somewhat more discreetly.

It was dark; the street lonely and lampless. We had then a tug for it; and after we had both rolled on the pavement, and with difficulty picked ourselves up, we agreed to walk on more soberly.¹⁸

Charlotte Brontë has re-introduced the Angrian theme of male rivalry, but she uses it as a means for exposing Hunsden's thoughts about women and, in particular, about Frances. According to him, Frances is “‘too good for [Crimsworth], but not good enough for me,’” and he is jealous of Crimsworth's happiness (“‘what business have you to be suited so well with a partner?’”). He cannot imagine finding his heart's repose in Crimsworth's “‘Alpine peri,’” but dreams instead of a “‘queen’” with “‘a nobler and better developed shape than that perverse, ill-shriven child can boast.’” Hunsden's ideal, in fact, is the type that attracted the young Rochester, and in Jane Eyre the author will imagine Rochester having married such a woman and found disillusionment. Bertha was formerly “‘a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram; tall, dark, and majestic’” (Ch. XXVII). But the Rochester we know scorns both his wife and that “‘extensive armful’” (Ch. XXIII), the “queenly” Miss Ingram (Ch. XVII), delighting rather in his peri down from the mountains of the moon. However, such a change of opinion is merely hinted at in The Professor; Charlotte Brontë projects a possible romantic relationship by recording Hunsden's superfluous protestations of indifference to Frances and by merging the roles of Hunsden and Crimsworth.

A close reading of the novel's last chapter reveals that Frances continues to be more central and more intensely realized than the narrator. Even the interesting state of hypochondria is transferred to the heroine. At least, though it is not so denominated, hypochondria appears to be Frances' state. On her wedding day she is found crying by a bewildered bridegroom. Crimsworth registers his incomprehension while yet reporting her distress: “Singular to state, she was, or had been crying.” When he asks if she is ready, she replies “‘Yes, Monsier,’ with something very like a checked sob”; and he tells us that he expressed himself “sorry to see her in such low spirits, and requested to be allowed an insight into the origin thereof.” While we are told that he was sympathetic, his language, by its uncolloquial formality, and by its suggestion of uncertainty and incomprehension (“she was, or had been”; “something very like”), imposes upon us (intrigued, after all, by Frances's condition) a sense of a superior sympathy with Frances. Charlotte Brontë wants to explore the woman's point of view—to review her anxieties, and in doing so she perceptibly distances herself and the reader from the male narrator. Thus, this scene is very different from its successor in Jane Eyre, where the heroine divulges her nightmare to a man whose sympathy she can record without detracting from her own centrality. Moreover, in Jane Eyre the presence of Bertha justifies the heroine's fears about marriage, whereas in The Professor Charlotte Brontë has not “planned ahead” for Frances's distress.

The next detailed view of Frances also shows her dissatisfied, though now her dissatisfaction has a definite, ascertainable origin. It is a year and a half later when she declares:

“I am not satisfied … you are now earning eight thousand francs a year” (it was true; my efforts, punctuality, the fame of my pupils' progress, the publicity of my station, had so far helped me on), “while I am still at my miserable twelve hundred francs. I can do better, and I will.”

“You work as long and as diligently as I do, Frances.”

Crimsworth's parenthetical agreement, suggesting as it does his acceptance of his natural right to getting on, stimulates sympathy with Frances's ambitions. Her wish is to set up a school and then, when they have “realize[d] an independency,” to retire to England. Thus, we expect to see two new, specific objectives achieved before the novel's ending.

The continuing unfolding of Frances's personality is integrated with the rise of a woman against a socially-determined oppression. Crimsworth is an important, if unconscious, part of this oppression. In his eyes Frances remains, if not as frightened as a mouse, at least “as docile as a well-trained child”; and the fact that Frances prefers to call her husband “Monsieur” seems almost to justify his opinion. However, though the author continues to confirm her heroine's docility, she discloses a side of Frances that is dignified and, at still other times, elfish. Ten years later, Frances is in one sense “become another woman, though in another she remained unchanged.” Crimsworth even writes that he “seemed to possess two wives.” For Frances daily transformed herself into “Madame the directress, a stately and elegant woman”; then, at home, “the lady directress vanished from before my eyes, and Frances Henri, my own little lace-mender, was magically restored to my arms.” It is in these moments that, occasionally, Frances would show “some stores of raillery, of ‘malice,’ and would vex, tease, pique” Crimsworth about his “‘bizarreries anglaises.’” However, as in the proposal chapter, we do not see the lover respond to her “elfish freak” as Rochester responds to Jane's. That sort of repartee and lively disagreement occurs not in the talk of the lovers, but in the talk of Frances and Hunsden.

This vignette is particularly interesting because Charlotte Brontë so soon followed it with the extended treatment in Jane Eyre of Rochester's and even St. John's discovery of two women in Jane. (She cultivates a “very flinty” side with Rochester at the end of Ch. XXIV; and she changes from “absolute submission” to “determined revolt” in dealing with her cousin in Ch. XXXIV.) Interesting too for its anticipation of Jane Eyre is Crimsworth's description of the quality of their marriage. Theirs, he says, is an ideal union where Frances “reposed in him a confidence so unlimited that topics of conversation could no more be wanting with him than subjects for communion with her own heart.” It will be noticed that, by having Crimsworth speak of himself in the third person, Charlotte Brontë contrives to advance the woman's point of view of the marriage. And it is very like the ideal marriage depicted at the close of Jane Eyre:

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.

These pages have centered on Frances's professional success and on new insights into her personality. There is then introduced a new subject: the idea of two types of unsuitable mate for a woman. Frances believes that a woman must “‘revolt’” against a marriage that is “‘slavery … for freedom is indispensable.’” But her opinion simply indicates something additional about her character; it is not an opinion that grows out of the novel. Frances is never tried. Crimsworth, though not exactly spontaneously caring, is not really “‘a harsh, envious, careless man’” while Hunsden, though claimed as having formerly been a variety of “‘a profligate, a prodigal, a drunkard, or a tyrant,’” is debarred by the plot from a role as Frances's lover. But, if one softens the epithets, this is the problem that confronts the next heroine. St. John approaches the first type, Rochester the second; and Jane, when she discovers the consequences to herself of their attitudes, avoids first the slavery of being Rochester's mistress, then the slavery of being St. John's “‘useful tool’” (Ch. XXXV).

The next scene shows the Crimsworths living in England with Hunsden as neighbor. Yorke Hunsden, “still unmarried,” “wanders from land to land.” Like the young Rochester, he does not spend much time at his old family mansion. Like Rochester, as well as Mr. Yorke in Shirley, the cigar-smoking Hunsden “is a polite man in his own house”; and like the later men he has a romantic past: a passionately loved mistress. Charlotte Brontë continues interested enough to develop Hunsden's potential as a romantic figure in conjunction with Frances, and has him confess his past to the novel's heroine. “One glorious night in June,” after Crimsworth “had been taunting him about his ideal bride,” Hunsden stops in the moonlit glade to exhibit a miniature of the black-haired “Lucia.” It is Frances's bold intuition that Hunsden “‘never seriously thought of marrying her’” because Lucia flouted convention. In this way the unsuitability of Hunsden's ideal is attested to at the same time that his blindness to the novel's (only) ideal woman is underlined. Both the reason for his discontentment and the nature of its possible remedy are suggested, but only the next novel will exploit these circumstances.

The professor's narrative shifts to the present tense. Frances is preparing tea. But before closing his memoirs Crimsworth has “a word to say of Victor.” This supplementary character sketch of their child Victor is so curious that, far from terminating interest in the novel world, it creates bewilderment about it. The boy who when he smiles “looks so like his mother” has a close friendship with Hunsden which recalls the relationship of the three adults.

Victor has a preference for Hunsden, full as strong as I deem desirable, being considerably more potent, decided, and indiscriminating, than any I ever entertained for that personage myself. Frances, too, regards it with a sort of unexpressed anxiety.

Moreover, Victor has received a large faithful dog named Yorke, “after the donor”; but Yorke, bitten by a rabid dog, is shot by Crimsworth. Victor is heartbroken, believing his father could have tried curing him: “‘you should have burnt the wound with a hot iron, or covered it with caustic.’” This event perpetuates the conflict between Crimsworth and Hunsden, especially since Victor, who is very close spiritually to his mother, attracts Hunsden's interest. At the novel's end, instead of “grappling” in the street with his difficult double, Crimsworth, as it were, shoots him.

Now this little episode underlines what is unsatisfactory about the last two chapters. The conflict injected into the Frances section is cut short, but not resolved. In effect, Charlotte Brontë, stimulated perhaps by her involvement with Frances, appends a number of personal interests. She relates several real-life anecdotes which have impressed her: there is Emily's cauterizing a dog-bite, and perhaps the story of an unfortunate love-affair of Mary Taylor's father. She describes moments of intense feeling experienced by herself: e.g., hypochondria, and her love of M. Heger. She realizes her daydreams: of winning over a worldly, interesting man, of running a school with great success. And she expresses her ideas: on the need for equality in marriage, on the condition of old maids, on her love for England, on the importance of feeling. It is as if Charlotte Brontë came to the end of her story—when she found she had “so many other things to say.” By contrast, during the body of the novel—after the Angrian beginning through Chapter XXIII—she sticks to her story of a variation on the Brussels experience. The treatment and the construction have their defects, but there is no material introduced that is unrelated to William Crimsworth and his experiences at the two schools. This is not true of the last chapters.

The last two chapters are unnecessary to the story of the professor, and even disrupt what unity the novel possesses. Charlotte Brontë appears to have a new interest, released by the need to express Frances's reaction to the proposal, and prompting her to indulge in sketching the development of the shyly rebellious lace-mender into an independent, lively woman. It is easy to see why, after recording the fairly straightforward progress of Crimsworth, Charlotte Brontë was absorbed by her heroine's situation. Given the author's theme, Frances's resistance to social oppression will be more difficult, more pertinent, and more moving, simply because she is a woman. And in undertaking the portrayal of a woman's rather than a man's desire for independence and equality, a more interesting story of relations between the sexes is immediately promised. The ensuing struggle will, at least in a Victorian novel, naturally enter a woman's love life. Moreover, by having a man try to act as the providence of a woman who wishes to gain independence, Charlotte Brontë provides herself with a romantic plot of great potential charm. The dilemma manifests itself in a conflict, momentary in The Professor and protracted in Jane Eyre, which ends in the woman's gaining full equality and respect, and in the man's expressed satisfaction at this outcome.

However, here at the end of the first novel the material serving to unfold Frances's character is very desultorily presented. Furthermore, in seeking to confirm her heroine's attractiveness and intelligence, the author is induced to associate Frances with the more sexually experienced Yorke Hunsden. The space devoted to describing their relationship suggests that the narrator no longer afforded an adequate testimony to Frances's qualities. Hunsden is not essentially changed, but the emphasis is now shifted from his alliance with Crimsworth to his similar appreciation of Frances and his need for a woman. In his character and in his situation, the Hunsden of the last chapters comes increasingly to resemble Rochester.

Thus a variety of tentative subjects is introduced, all of which were of compulsive interest to the author—as we know from the fact that she re-introduced them in later novels, as well as from biographical evidence. However, inevitably, Charlotte Brontë does not at the end of The Professor do justice to these subjects. In the later novels they are treated at greater length and are made organically part of the whole. Still, the inadequacy of the treatment should not detract from the significance of the attempt. She was sufficiently stimulated by the new subject to prolong her narrative beyond the proposal scene. Indeed, the necessarily inadequate, sketchy treatment of this new subject may even have sustained the novelist's interest, stimulating her to realize more satisfactorily the characters and events here adumbrated. The presentation in the last chapters of The Professor of a new story centered on the heroine forms a bridge between the body of the first novel and the next novel Jane Eyre. The importance of the end of The Professor lies in its evident influence as a corrective and as a stimulus helping to lead Charlotte Brontë to conceive her first masterpiece.

Notes

1. For information on the juvenilia see Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford, The Brontës' Web of Childhood (Columbia U. Press, 1941). For examples of Charlotte's work see especially the compilations Legends of Angria, ed. Ratchford with the collaboration of William Clyde DeVance (Yale U. Press, 1933); The Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë in Two Volumes, ed. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington. (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1936 and 1938); and Five Novelettes: Passing Events, Julia, Mina Laury, Captain Henry Hastings, Caroline Vernon, transcribed and ed. Winifred Gérin (London: Folio, 1971).

2. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, rev. ed. (London: Oxford U. Press, 1961), p. 285.

3. This point has been made by many critics. Earl A. Knies writes that “The Professor, coming seven years after the ‘Farewell to Angria,’ might be considered part of Charlotte's mature work, but it is really a transitional piece.” The Art of Charlotte Brontë (Ohio U. Press, 1969), p. 88. The nature of its immaturity is well described by Tillotson, pp. 282-85 and 288; W. A. Craik, The Brontë Novels (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 48; and Margaret Howard Blom, Charlotte Brontë (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1977), pp. 79-82.

4. That The Professor resembles the Angria tales in using a male narrator is observed by both Ratchford, Brontës' Web, p. 171, and Tillotson, p. 293, n. 5. And both note too the lingering hold of Angria to be found in the early, English chapters of The Professor. See Ratchford, pp. 190-98, and Tillotson, p. 282.

5. The Professor was finished in April 1846 and the fair copy made by the end of June. Mrs. Gaskell states that it came back rejected from one of its outings to publishers on August 25, 1846, the day Patrick Brontë had his cataract removed. Whether the novel was re-read before being sent out again cannot be known. But we know that Jane Eyre was begun during her father's convalescence. It was thus begun about two months after The Professor had been completed and at a time when the substance of The Professor would probably have been reviewed whether or not that novel was itself re-read. Moreover, since this initial effort continued “plodding its weary round in London,” it was very likely periodically brought to the author's mind while Jane Eyre was being written. The Life of Charlotte Brontë, introd. Clement Shorter (London: World's Classics, 1924), p. 251.

6. Tillotson, pp. 288-89 and 293. In her discussion of Agnes Grey W. A. Craik also makes interesting comparisons between these three works, pp. 203-06.

7. The last chapter is the longest in the novel. The penultimate chapter (XXIV) is one of the longest: only Chs. XII, XIX, XXII, and XXIII are longer. This last, it will be noticed, is the proposal chapter and is itself lengthened by the introduction of new material (as I show in my text).

8. Cynthia A. Linder describes The Professor as tracing Crimsworth's economic, then emotional progress, this last ending “when he has reached his goal—that of marriage to Mlle Henri.” My point is that, while William's growth ends with marriage, Charlotte Brontë does not end the novel there; she continues it, concentrating on Mlle Henri's development. In fact, a comment by Linder suggests this—though it is not followed up—for she writes of “the puritanical exterior hiding a strong spirit, which is what we see developing in Mlle Henri after her marriage.” Romantic Imagery in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 27 and 28.

9. My references are to the Everyman ed., introd. Margaret Lane (London: Dent, 1964). I use the Penguin Jane Eyre, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth, Middx., 1966). Subsequent chapter references will be given in my text.

10. On Charlotte Brontë's use of metaphors see Margot Peters, Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), Ch. 4.

11. In The Complete Poems of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Clement Shorter, with bibliog. and notes by C. W. Hatfield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), the poem “Master and Pupil” is reprinted with the note that it was written “in an exercise-book used by Charlotte Brontë in Brussels, 1843,” p. 215.

12. In her 1834 “My Angria and the Angrians” she has Patrick Benjamin Wiggins—a study of Branwell—name his sisters as Charlotte, Jane, and Anne. Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings, II, 11. Brian Wilks's The Brontës (London: Hamlyn, 1975), in which he remarks that Emily was the only daughter christened with two names (p. 69), reproduces drawings and writings by Emily that show she signed herself Emily Jane Brontë. See pp. 55, 73, 105, and 113.

13. In Ch. XXI Rochester, Jane tells us, “chuckled over” her poverty.

14. Indeed, Crimsworth's cool observations and his analyses of the women around him suggest that he does not like women (see especially Ch. X, XI, and XII). Unlike Rochester, he is debarred from expressing enjoyment with the company of women because, for one thing, he is responsible as narrator for our understanding of the women introduced.

15. Margot Peters thinks that the language expresses a correspondence between the mental depression described and a reaction against sexuality, p. 82. This is why the description comes after his engagement to Frances and immediately after his discovery that he “was a sensualist.” For Linder, in this passage “Charlotte Brontë comes as close to stating as Victorian propriety will allow, that William's attack of morbidity is the result of suppressed sexuality,” p. 14.

16. Yet if we remember how important this subject is, from the beginning when Jane is sent to the Red Room through her talks with Helen Burns and with Rochester, and also in her own internal debates, merely to have the conflict of passion and reason aired here is significant.

17. Charlotte Brontë was fully aware of her reliance on such relationships. In a very interesting passage at the end of her 1834 story “The Spell” she refers to Zamorna's twin brother Valdacella as his “alter-ego.” The Spell: Ane Extravaganza, ed. George Edwin MacLean (1931; rpt. London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1972), p. 144.

18. Margaret Blom finds here an acting out of “William's victory over the evil within himself; he has fought and thrown his personal devil,” p. 77. But a re-reading of the passage shows that Crimsworth does not throw his alter-ego.