ABSTRACT
Charlotte Brontë contributed thousands of pages of poetry and prose to the sagas of the imagined worlds of Glass Town and Angria, in genres ranging from lyric effusion to libelous pseudo-journalism. Looking back at what we now categorize as her juvenilia, Charlotte Brontë casts her youthful writing as an obstacle to be superseded, half-formed and insufficient, at best a painfully necessary step in her development into mature novelist.1 Error and lack are figured in terms of stylistic failure, of crudity, excessive ornament and redundancy, but also as a deficiency in content. “[P]lain and homely” ostensibly describes the prose of The Professor (1857), but it simultaneously defines the borders of appropriate subject matter: her “hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs … he should never get a shilling he had not earned … no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station” (vi). A strict economy in both style and substance along with a disciplined adherence to the constraints of the real characterize the author who has successfully transcended the fancies and excesses of her youth. At first blush, the preface to The Professor seems a briskly triumphalist manifesto for realism in fiction. As the first novel and the first non-Angrian writing she attempted to publish,
The Professor occupies a crucial place in Charlotte Brontë’s chronology, marking the point of transition between her nearly two decades as a closet-author and her short but extraordinary career as a celebrated novelist. The narrative that Charlotte Brontë would repeatedly attempt to impose on her development treats this passage as one from romance into realism, a progression reinforced by the periodizing structures of English literary history that frame the 1840s as the point of emergence of Victorian realism from the residues of the Romantic era. But realism’s transcendence over romance continually proves equivocal in Charlotte Brontë’s writing; after all, despite several attempts and the success of Jane Eyre (1847), The Professor was not published until 1857 after Charlotte
persuade her earlier failure: to her chagrin, Charlotte Brontë found that publishers were after “something more imaginative and poetical – something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly” (vii). But what might seem a complaint about the vulgar taste of the day takes on a more sympathetic cast as Charlotte Brontë imagines the hearts and minds of her rejecters in terms that anticipate her famous strictures on Jane Austen:
Men in business are usually thought to prefer the real; on trial the idea will be often found fallacious: a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrilling – the strange, startling, and harrowing – agitates divers souls that show a calm and sober surface.
