The Professor

"The Professor" was written before Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" (1847), but was rejected by publishers until after her death. 

The hero of Charlotte Brontë's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school...

Though "Jane Eyre" is deeply emotional, dramatic, and at times gloomy, "The Professor" was a bright contrast in comparison. It is almost as if Miss Brontë was striving for an accurate depiction of the harsh realities of life in both her novels, but had not mastered the writing techniques of anticipation and foreshadow until her second novel.