In The Professor, Charlotte Brontë defiantly created an externally
unprepossessing protagonist in William Crimsworth, whose unglamorous appearance
and station belie an internal power. He is conscious of banked energies and
emotions that must find an outlet in a hostile world. In this first novel,
Brontë drew on her recent experiences as a student and teacher in a Belgian
girls' school. She wrote it while struggling with the most emotionally harrowing
event of her adult life, her unreciprocated romantic attraction to her married
teacher in Brussels, Constantin Heger. This background lends the first-person
narrative a quality that would become a hallmark of Brontë's style: a striking
emotional intensity.