An impulse at the Oxfam Book Shop — AKA my local kryptonite dealer (must weed some more to donate)! Undoubtedly it’s due in part to the end of my career as a tenured professor (though in this story it is ‘professor’ in the French sense of teacher). Anyway, I always enjoy spending some time with Ms B though we are so very different she understands well the effects of a life of yearning and an unwillingness to settle for things that are less than you truly want. The protagonist William Crimsworth can be a bit hard to like for some, as he is so prickly and so very sure of what he doesn’t want, but like many young (and also many not so young) he finds it difficult at times to articulate what he does want.

Brontë, like many of her time, is far too reliant on judging through the racist pseudo-science of physiognomy and a strong belief in ‘national characters’ that is likewise reductive, and Crimsworth can be cringingly dismissive of people based on his assumptions about their land of birth, particularly so once he moves to Brussels and makes clear distinctions about the different populations he finds there. Of course there is the old enmity with the French as well; Crimsworth finds employment at the two neighbouring schools run by François Peret and Zoraïde Reuter. It offers an opportunity to assess these duplicitous French button-pushers as well as to comment less than favourably on the population of school girls (there is no commentary on school boys as M Peret’s school is just a way to get Crimsworth into the clutches of Mlle Reuter).

Crimsworth: every time I see his whilst reading I have the double bell ring of Molesworth and cringeworthy. He’s not completely without humour though there are long spells of earnest struggle. Best comic relief is his frenemy Yorke Hunsden, a rich man who sets him on his path of discovery by railing at the estranged brother from whom Crimsworth sought sanctuary after refusing his uncles’ plans to send him to the church and marry a cousin after he completed his Eton education. His brother’s mill is a dreadful dark place and while Crimsworth soon distinguishes himself as a quick study who translates business letters in German and French, his competence seems to enrage his brother further. It’s no surprise that the brothers decide to part ways after Hunsden offers an opinion on things. You can see touches of Rochester in him–imperious, opinionated, headstrong–though he has none of the eventual humility.

[His ‘romance’ is interesting in a very weird collision of the Gothic and the puritan.]

With the all-important letter of introduction (networking, it’s all in the handshake) Crimsworth heads off to Brussels to become a teacher to the hodgepodge of girls thrust into this educational experiment. The long rich and the nouveau riches, the middle class at times: Brontë’s assessment of them all seems to come more from the perspective of a poor student having been amongst such folks. Her heroine begins demurely enough: Frances Henri is overlooked at first by Crimsworth, literally, because she seems to shrink into herself. Also the devious Mlle Reuter is doing her best to manipulate her newest teacher.

Frances is half-English though, so that eventually asserts itself in his attention; the other half literally neutral Swiss, though when Hunsden spoofs clichés about her homeland she defends it with spirit. She remains far too deferential on the whole, but she has a spine including her unwillingness to give up her work which is probably what makes this early novel most interesting in its time. Especially William’s quick acceding to the requirement. One of her speeches is one of my fave Brontë quotes, a riposte to Hunsden: ‘Better to be without logic than without feeling.’ The lie of rationality when it removes all human consideration. We are not machines.

My other perhaps all-time fave Brontë quote comes from this book, too. When William and Hunsden are first serious talking about life — much of which contains ejaculations from the latter such as ‘Stuff!’ and ‘Nonsense!’ Hunsden tells Crimsworth he suggests he should reconsider the advantages of mending relations with his uncles due to their rank if nothing else (‘Still, one of your uncles is a lord, though rather an obscure and not very wealthy one…you should consider worldly interest’). William’s response is emphatic.

I must follow my own devices — I must till the day of my death — because I can neither comprehend, adopt, nor work out those of other people.

Charlotte Brontë, The Professor

I knew this quote long before I read the book but it has lost none of its power. On the surface it may seem simply a GDI response, the old-fashioned American-style contrarian, the ‘true’ individual! But for me it was a finger hesitantly put on an issue that I have always thought of as ‘the weirdness of me’ and my inability to be like or understand the minds of other people. I am old enough now to not much care, to know the value of just following the weird paths of my brain because I enjoy finding where it leads and if it pleases no one else, it pleases me. But in recent years, as I researched autism and came to understand the various ways it manifests, especially in women (we mask more, surprise!) I had that ah-ha moment. Do I need a formal diagnosis? No, especially as they are 1) difficult and expensive to obtain and 2) I’m about to lose my health care.

But I’ve learned a lot about the ways people adapt to this knowledge and in the last few years I have done my own adapting. A lot of it comes down to do I need to do that or do I just think I need to do that? An awful lot of it is arranging my life and my days to the greatest advantage so I do not feel tired, overwhelmed or discouraged. The hardest habit to break is avoiding things that seem ‘easy’ which seems counter-intuitive but here’s why: things that were easy for me were generally discouraged as anti-social or unproductive.

Why did I become an academic? Lots of reasons, but a chief one was that doing well at academic subjects was one of the few things I enjoyed that also earned me approval. A path of relatively low resistance with some perks as well as genuine fascinations: Of course I was going to follow its turnings.

Available at your local used book store, or local library if the tech bros haven’t killed it already, or the Internet Archive (free library) or Project Gutenberg (free books) and even Librivox, the free audio book site.