In The Professor, Charlotte Brontë defiantly created an externally unprepossessing protagonist in William Crimsworth, whose unglamorous appearance and station belie an internal power. He is conscious of banked energies and emotions that must find an outlet in a hostile world.

In this first novel, Brontë drew on her recent experiences as a student and teacher in a Belgian girls school. She wrote it while struggling with the most emotionally harrowing event of her adult life, her unreciprocated romantic attraction to her married teacher in Brussels, Constantin Heger. This background lends the first-person narrative a quality that would become a hallmark of Brontës style: a striking emotional intensity.