Shirley and The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

Shirley and The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. Written before Jane Eyre but not published until 1857, The Professor draws on Charlotte Brontë’s own experience in Brussels to tell a tender and sometimes gently comic story of the love between a young English teacher and one of his students. The relationship of master and pupil also features in Shirley, a much more ambitious novel set among the Yorkshire dales, in which social unrest during the Napoleonic wars provides a background for the love between heiress Shirley Keeldar and her former tutor. Though linked by themes found also in Villette and Jane Eyre – love, class, female emancipation – these two very different books illustrate a range of experience which may surprise readers only familiar with those more famous novels.