The Professor and Emma, A Fragment

Charlotte and Emily Brontë had both been away in Brussels undergoing private tuition to fit them for teaching. Emily had returned to Haworth overcome by homesickness after only nine months, but Charlotte, after two years as pupil teacher in the pensionnat of Mme Heger, had returned with a peculiar sickness of hear own: 'a heart sickness which could not be confessed', for she had fallen in love with the husband of Madame. Dynamic, gifted, a man of wide vision, the professor had helped to mature the woman in Charlotte, who warmed to his culture. His presence haunted her in the years that followed, and her outward calm was a mask to hide the smouldering fire within. Nothing, we are told, helped her at lonely Haworth in this wretched period. Then, suddenly, she wrote it all down in a book: this book. Branwell, the beloved brother, had died, returning from his tutor's post in scandal and disgrace, and not a single pupil had been forthcoming for the school the sisters had hoped to establish. In reaction they turned in upon themselves to their secret hopes and dreams. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote Agnes Grey and Charlotte The Professor. Charlotte's book was not published in her lifetime. We who read it today can see it both as an engrossing novel and a dream unrealized: 'a tender vision of something life refused'. This volume also includes the two chapters of the unfinished Emma, written during the last months of Charlotte's life.