SOURCE: “‘We Have Learnt to Love Her More than Her Books’: The Critical Reception of Brontë's Professor.” In Review of English Studies, Vol. 47, No. 186, 1996, pp. 175-87.

In the following essay, Malone explores the claim by some critics that Brontë fails to credibly produce a male protagonist in The Professor. Malone argues that it is not possible for a male protagonist to relate convincingly the type of suffering about which Brontë sought to write.

‘The Professor appears before the public under circumstances which preclude criticism’,¹ mourned the Saturday Review in June 1857. Smith, Elder's decision to publish Gaskell's biography and Charlotte Brontë's first written novel in close succession was clearly an astute move. On its publication, Jane Eyre was condemned as immoral and unchristian,² as emphatically a bad book,³ as a book not to be given to the young.⁴ Less than ten years later, the Edinburgh Review is...