Shirley

This was Charlotte Brontë's second novel, written during the terrible period in her life when Branwell, Emily and Anne all died within a few months of each other. It never had quite the popular success of Jane Eyre, and it tends to get tucked away in the category of "industrial novels" together with North and South and Hard Times. But it is one of the handful of books that can claim to have introduced a new given name into the language (where would we be without Ms Bassey, Ms Temple and Ms Williams?). And in places it's a fairly hard-hitting feminist text as well.

The story is set in the early 1810s, with the Yorkshire textile industry hard-hit by the export restrictions of the Napoleonic wars. Unemployed textile operatives, with no show more prospect of work, are getting drawn into rioting and machine-breaking. Vicar's niece Caroline is in love with her cousin Robert, an Anglo-Belgian mill-owner ruined by the war in Antwerp and trying to make a new start in Yorkshire, but of course he can't think of marriage until his business is on a sound footing, which it won't be until the war ends and the operatives stop rioting. And to make a bad situation worse, Caroline's fiery uncle quarrels with Robert over politics and forbids her to see him.

Then, a good third of the way through the novel already, Shirley finally arrives on the scene. She's a young woman of independent ideas who has, very unusually, inherited an estate in her own right, and she's determined to show that she can run it as well as any man. Charlotte Brontë must have heard tales about the famous Anne Lister, of Shibden Hall in Halifax, who was in a similar situation and about the same age as Shirley. (Obviously she didn't know about Lister's secret diaries, full of her love affairs with local young women, which were only deciphered fairly recently.) Caroline and Shirley soon become intimate friends and have long discussions about politics, the church, women's role in society, how damaging it is that middle-class women have so few types of employment open to them, and so on. Shirley scandalises a few curates, there are rumours of an involvement with her tenant Robert, but she still finds just about all the eligible men in Yorkshire chasing her.

Shirley is a wonderful character, Caroline is enjoyable if sometimes just a bit too good to be true, and there are some splendid dialogues and set-pieces, including the Sunday-school picnic and the grand scene when the rioters attack the mill, and there's a host of entertaining minor characters who give Brontë the opportunity for flashes of authentic Yorkshire dialect and some ironic voice-over commentary. I especially enjoyed Robert's very Belgian-bourgeoise sister Hortense, with her stubborn insistence on living according to the standards she's been brought up to, even though the whole of West Yorkshire is laughing at her odd dress and the strange food she prepares.

But it does all seem to ramble a bit, strands of plot seem to fall out of sight to be picked up again apologetically many chapters later, and for all its feminist bravura the plot comes to a very conventional conclusion with a double marriage, at least one half of which makes nonsense of about half the talk that preceded it. The shocking defeat of Napoleon that makes such a happy-end possible may not be altogether a surprise to the reader. Also, Caroline and Robert have both found themselves in life-threatening situations at points in the story where the reader knows there is no way the author would be able to proceed further without them, and Caroline herself is probably the only person who was surprised when her long-lost mother was finally unmasked.

Whilst Brontë is clearly very sympathetic with the plight of the starving workers, she is almost nauseously insistent that all the trouble is the fault of external agitators who are non-conformist preachers and therefore — in her Anglican view of the world — ipso facto alcoholics. And she has no qualms at all about seeing the lot of them transported to Australia. So probably not the place to look for balanced political insight. But well worth all that inconvenience for the time we spend with the title character.

The audiobook read by Anna Bentinck works well: she has a very good feel for the rhythm of Brontë's prose, and she has no trouble at all making French with a Yorkshire accent sound different from French with a Belgian accent, a trick that is required rather more often in this book than in most other Victorian novels. show less

'You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek...you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.'

It took me quite a long time to finish this novel by Charlotte Bronte and it is not because I didn’t like it. I started it in a moment of frantic work and ended up reading only few pages a day , at night, when I was completely exhausted. So I went through the first 100 pages in … two months … but I’ve finished reading the other 442 in the last few days. While reading a book, I suffer from what I call “professional distortion”, I mean, I cannot simply enjoy the reading getting involved in the story. I tend to be always catching glimpses of other texts, finding links and show more connections, I need to underline the best passages and to add personal notes here and there, I search for more information about the author/ess as well as about the historical context in the setting. I know, I can be quite pedantic sometimes! Why do I have to be so complicated? Don’t worry, I do enjoy the stories I read, when it happens they are good. Enough with useless chatting, let’s start working on SHIRLEY .

What do you think of a story in which the two heroines seem to like the same man, the hero of the novel? And what if they are best friends and he proposes to the wealthier of the two girls to solve his financial problems but loves the other one? What do you expect from such premises? I found it extremely enjoyable.

SYNOPSIS

Shirley is Charlotte Bronte's only historical novel and her most topical one. Written at a time of social unrest, it is set during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when economic hardship led to riots in the woollen district of Yorkshire. A mill-owner, Robert Moore, is determined to introduce new machinery despite fierce opposition from his workers; he ignores their suffering, and puts his own life at risk. Robert sees marriage to the wealthy Shirley Keeldar as the solution to his difficulties, but he loves his cousin Caroline. She suffers misery and frustration, and Shirley has her own ideas about the man she will choose to marry. The friendship between the two women, and the contrast between their situations, is at the heart of this compelling novel, which is suffused with Bronte's deep yearning for an earlier time. (For a more detailed plot click HERE)
SHIRLEY was Charlotte second published novel after the success of JANE EYRE. When she began it, she was one of four siblings, she finished it as the only survivor sister and that influenced her writing much, of course.
SHIRLEY is not her best book, I mean, it is less compulsively readable than JANE EYRE. It is, anyway, the one in which she expresses more of her character: her conviction that women might be as well qualified as men to practise a profession (which sets her apart from most of her own contemporaries); her contempt for the market of marriage; her experience as a governess; her longing for a better past.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE & SOCIAL CRITICISM

Now the negative part of my review.

I’ve always considered Charlotte Bronte very brave since, when she wrote JANE EYRE, she completely disappointed and scandalized her "perbenistic" Victorian middle-class audience, creating a heroine who dared too much, who was greatlly independent and strong-willed, but, above all, who was totally different from the Victorian ideal woman, “the angel of the hearth”.
In SHIRLEY, however, she is not as brave as in her first novel , though her reader finds several pages in defence of the woman question and against the market of marriage. An example:
“Look at the numerous families of girls in the neighbourhood: the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they have something to do: their sisters have no earthly employment, but household work and sewing; no earthly pleasure, but an unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness.(…) They scheme, they plot, they dress to esnare husbands. (…) Could men live so themselves?”(p. 329)
Why am I saying that Charlotte Bronte was not very brave, then?
Her dealing with the woman question and the factory workers’ suffering is quite corageous in the social context of the Victorian Age but Charlotte, with SHIRLEY, drew back instead of daring more respect to what she had done in JANE EYRE: her good intentions are undermined by her acceptance of divisions of class, sex and race as natural and eternal. Her first and only historical novel deals with the Luddite riots (1811-12), the working-classes’ violent attacks against the introduction of machinery in factories. However, her effort to link the unfair suffering of workers to that of women is problematic from the start: she avoids representing the suffering of workers as fully as she depicts that of women. Then the novel’s middle-class women are as complicitous in the oppression of the workers as they are in “the regeneration of the interesting coloured population of the globe”. She fails to make the direct connection between the women’s right to be heard and that of the workers.
Moreover, in the scenes in which Robert Moore, the mill-owner male-protagonist of SHIRLEY faces the crowd of furious workers both the heroines and the narrator side with the hero.
So, I must admit, though reluctantly, that Charlotte Bronte was not as brave as her dear friend and first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, who was writing and published her MARY BARTON in the same years (Shirley 1849 – Mary Barton 1848) or would again bravely advocate for better living and working conditions for factory-workers in her NORTH AND SOUTH (1855).

I liked SHIRLEY but was a bit disappointed by one of my favourite writers. I am sure it mustn’t have been easy to write against public opinion at that time, especially as a woman, but her analysis of the claims of working men concludes in a mystification: there aren’t enough factory jobs, yet there’s no way to provide them so long as machines are more efficient labourers than humans, or to reconcile the mill-owner’s (just) demand for increased productivity and profit with the (just) demand of his workers for steady occupation and income.
Elizabeth Gaskel, instead, lived in Manchester, the big industrial city in the north of England, as the wife of reverend Gaskell, and well knew the reality she describes through her writing. She sympathised with workers in their struggle to improve their living conditions; what she never approved of in the working class was the choice of violence as a fighting strategy. She absolutely rejected violence and arrogance both in the employers and in their employees. She invited them to face each other in an open, honest, man-to-man relationship based on dialogue. She was attacked by her friends enterpreuners who published in their newspapers harsh criticism against her MARY BARTON since they felt offended by the portrayal Gaskell did of their selfishness and inhumanity. But she went on writing RUTH (inspired by a “fallen woman” who became a prostitute she really met) or NORTH AND SOUTH ( where Margaret, the protagonist, and the narrator mostly side with the workers) . show less

If you've read any Charlotte Brontë novels I am 99% sure you have read Jane Eyre, and if you've read two, you've probably also read Villette. She only wrote four novels in her lifetime (the fourth, The Professor, was actually the first one she wrote and was published posthumously -- she very quickly wrote Jane Eyre to send it out to publishers after The Professor was rejected), and her second novel, Shirley, has historically been seen as her weakest. I haven't read Villette or The Professor yet (but I shall since I am running a Brontë sisters book club!), but from what I know about them they also are told primarily in first person through a single, central heroine, and focus on her interior and emotional life and how it butts up show more against societal constraints. Shirley, on the other hand, is much more of a novel that comments on British society and it spreads its focus across two heroines, Caroline Helstone (the orphaned niece of the local rector) and Shirley Keeldar (also orphaned and the heir to her family's estate who has just come of age).

For the first 200 pages of the novel, though, there is no Shirley! Instead, the reader gets some very hilarious commentary on the lifestyle and foibles of country curates (aka ministers in training). Charlotte knew of what she spoke as the daughter of a rector who frequently had to host teas and meals for her father's curates. The novel was published in 1849 but takes place in 1811-1812 when England was suffering economically due to a ban on exports of textiles during the Napoleonic War as well as the war of 1812 over in the good old United States. These first 200 pages introduce us to Robert Moore -- a son of Yorkshire who was raised in Belgium and the operator of a mill in Yorkshire that is on the property of the as-yet-unknown Shirley. The reader gets the context for his economic woes, his desire to replace his current hand-run equipment with mechanical weaving machines, and the impact that has on the out-of-work mill workers in the area that leads to rebellion (aka the Luddite movement). We learn a lot about Yorkshire, British politics, and economics and a little about Caroline Helstone. But we should not be surprised! On page 1, Charlotte tells us what to expect:

"If you think, from the prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic -- ay, even and Anglo-Catholic -- might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week: it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb."

When we do meet Shirley, though, she is a complicated delight. Whereas Caroline is quiet and reserved (with a pretty passionate and complicated interior life of her own), Shirley is confident and outgoing and unconventional -- all parts of her personality that she can express since she is independently wealthy whereas Caroline is dependent on the support of her uncle with no real prospects of marriage or place to put her energies beyond serving tea to the aforementioned hilarious curates.

This book is a lot less straightforward than Jane Eyre and so I will end my plot summary here. It should be noted that Charlotte also went through a lot of personal tragedy during the writing of this novel. First her brother Branwell, who she had been extremely close to in childhood, died after leading an extremely debauched lifestyle, then shortly after losing Branwell, her sister Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) died of tuberculosis, and not long after Emily died, her youngest sister Anne (author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) also died of tuberculosis. In the end, Charlotte was left alone in an isolated Yorkshire parish with her beloved but also very difficult father, having lost her mother and two older sisters when she was a young child.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Charlotte's sophomore effort, but I really liked it! It helps a lot if you don't compare it to Jane Eyre because Charlotte was trying to do something different here and I think she does it quite successfully. Plus, there are a few Jane Eyre-like pieces of characterization, authorial addresses to the reader, and plot twists to help keep things exciting. Recommended! show less

Shirley is an odd book. It doesn’t offer a tightly cohesive plot, but it does offer many moments In Which Charlotte Has Opinions, opinions about: politics, social and industrial change, marriage, the church, unrequited love, governesses, society’s expectations of women, family dynamics, illness and grief. I don’t always agree with her, but I enjoy how fiercely passionate she is -- and how fiercely passionate her characters can be. I also enjoyed that the plot twists unexpectedly at times, I found the portrayal of a Yorkshire community interesting, and I liked that at the centre of this novel, as much as it has such a thing, are two young women who are friends.

In spite of the title, Shirley arguably revolves as much around Caroline show more Helstone, the rector’s niece, as it does around Miss Shirley Keeldar, a landowner who has taken control of her property now that she is of age. The novel begins with a description of the curates and with unrest at Robert Moore’s mill, but these things belong to Caroline’s world: she lives with her uncle, and Robert Moore is a sort-of cousin3 and Caroline has French lessons from his sister.

Moreover, the book gives insight into Caroline’s inner-thoughts and anguish, whereas Shirley is always viewed with some distance. Significant moments for Shirley often occur off-screen and the reader learns about such incidents only once Shirley, or another character, tells someone else about them. A significant moment which does take place on-screen is told from the perspective of another character. While the narrative’s insistence that the reader cannot ever know Shirley and her story fully is a touch unsatisfying, it is also kind of fascinating.

(I suspect that the reader has to rely on what Shirley says and does, and on what others say about her, as we do for people we know in real life, because Charlotte was aiming to create something that was different not only from her previous work but from, as she saw it, many other novels of her time: a novel which better reflected reality.)

I don’t anticipate rereading Shirley for enjoyment the way I have read and reread Jane Eyre, but I am glad to have finally read it -- and I can see how it would be fun to analyse and discuss it.

A longer version of this review is on my blog: https://ladyherenya.dreamwidth.org/530348.html

“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem -- novel -- drama, thinking it fine -- divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial -- false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point; if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour.” show less

Charlotte Bronte was a gifted writer who had one great story to tell -- the story of self. She told that story best, and electrifyingly, in Jane Eyre, the story of an indomitable ego that chooses morality and personal integrity at any price. Her later books are sometimes-interesting, sometimes-not, reworkings of that theme. "Villette" has the integrated, appealing central character of JE, but succumbs to pathos. "Shirley" is full of interesting twists and turns, nearly all of which peter out, or worse. The subplot of populist rebellion against automating industrialism is interesting, but deflates as British military victory returns prosperity to the region. CB splits her female heroine into two women, demure Caroline and bold Shirley, show more who has what was then a man's name, and who is occasionally referenced with male pronouns and called "Captain Shirley." Caroline and Shirley clearly esteem and love each other, but this too goes wrong as the narrative requires classic marriage-plot denouements, with each proving unintentionally unsavory. Caroline's devotion to her leading man is creepily self-effacing, while Shirley's is even ickier, as she, her boyfriend, and CB all seem to agree that she will never live happily ever after unless and until she finds the man who can master and dominate her. The plot obliges, in a benevolent way that makes it clear this is not meant as irony. Anyone who thinks of CB as a feminist might want to read the last few chapters while hiding under a 19th century writing desk.

And yet . . . the book is worth reading. The frequent doses of great writing; the unflinchingly honest, and funny, insights into social foibles and clerical failings; the deeply resonant and empathetic portrayals of human loneliness and frustration all make it worthwhile. And what if CB, with her gender-bending, Luddite-channeling, transparently absurd love-is-submission happy ending, was groping toward something her early 19th century mind just wasn't ready for? show less

I will admit that 18th-19th century British lit is not my thing. Not that I hate it or anything, and as a history nerd, I respect the genre, but I've read quite a few novels from this genre and found them dull/unsavory or even ridiculous (the ending of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, for example)

However, this novel is a rare treat for me. I genuinely enjoyed the story. I wasn't sure what to expect since many authors from this period are a mixed bag, but I was happy that after having enjoyed Jane Eyre, I was able to take much pleasure in another book from the same author. It's all here - social commentary, showing various aspects of life of the rich and poor, etc. Now, there IS some sadness/ugliness here, which is to be expected, but I felt show more it was well-balanced.

Highly recommended, especially if you enjoyed Jane Eyre. I feel that this book is one of the best of its genre. 4.5/5 stars. show less

Oh, this book. How did the same author who wrote my beloved Jane Eyre also write this and Villette?

Unfortunately, I felt much the same way as I did about Villette when reading Shirley - boring, pretentious, and practically intolerable. I wanted so badly to like this but I just couldn't connect to the story or characters. Bronte throws some social commentary (owner vs. worker) in your face but doesn't make it feel integral to the story. And we get the typical woman who is disappointed in love and takes to her death bed only to recover when she finds her long lost mother has been right in front of her the whole book. I'm not sure how a book can be over-dramatic and boring at the same time.

I feel guilty not liking this, but there it is.