ABSTRACT
The main theme running through Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia had been the establishment and consolidation of an English colony in West Africa. The process of displacement, both of Europeans as they made the journey across to Africa, and of Africans as they were dispossessed from their lands and brought under European domination, allies the juvenilia to the imperialist interests of the English novel. The Professor traverses a different world, which is largely European, and where the process of displacement is not accompanied by dispossession. In this novel, English cultural, rather than political, hegemony, is established. The movement from the juvenilia to The Professor is comparable to the history of the novel, as it progresses from Oroonoko to Roxana: even while confined to a European milieu, the later writings contribute to the processes of colonisation, which had been dealt with in a more direct manner in the earlier texts.
