The Professor's House

Historian Godfrey St. Peter is the protagonist of the novel. Two of the three parts of the novel focus on his experiences, thoughts, and conflicts. The novel reflects his character development as he grapples with grief, old age, and mortality. This crisis starts when St. Peter’s family moves out of their old house and St. Peter himself realizes he is not ready to give up his study in the attic room of the old house. Throughout the first book of the novel, he refuses to “move on” by fully inhabiting his new house and continues to locate his intellectual—and much of his emotional—life in the old house. When his family goes to Europe for the summer, he essentially moves back into the old house—all actions that intensify his attachment to the past as a site of meaning in a world that now seems meaningless.

Early in the novel, he reflects on being a professor:

[He] had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust—many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well—but his misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him.