The Professor is Charlotte Bronte`s first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and conciousness of a man, William Crimsworth . Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Bronte is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. William`s first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls school where he teaches, played out in the school`s ` secret garden`. Balanced against thes is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Bronte`s death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.