The Professor was the first novel by Charlotte Brontë. It was originally written before Jane Eyre and rejected by many publishing houses, but was eventually published posthumously in 1857 by approval of Arthur Bell Nicholls, who accepted the task of reviewing and editing of the novel. The Professor is a story about the life of the resilient William Crimsworth. An English orphan raised by coldly aristocratic uncles, he rejects a life as a clergyman to work in his brother s mill in Yorkshire. Treated abominably in his tedious clerkship, Crimsworth escapes to Belgium and begins teaching in a boys school. There he eventually meets the headmistress of a neighboring girls school, Zoraide Reuter, as well as one of the teachers in the girls school, Francis Henri. Narrated from a convincing male perspective, Bronte exercised her skill as a writer in telling a tale based on her own experiences as a student in Brussels, challenging many of the assumptions of Victorian society in the process. Crimsworth matures, finds a fulfilling profession, and discovers love in this significant commencement to Charlotte Bronte s literary career.