Charlotte BRONTE : Shirley

Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning." 

Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.
A work that combines social commentary with the more private preoccupations of Jane Eyre, Shirley demonstrates the full range of Brontë's literary talent. "Shirley is a revolutionary novel," wrote Brontë biographer Lyndall Gordon. "Shirley follows Jane Eyre as a new exemplar but so much a forerunner of the feminist of the later twentieth century that it is hard to believe in her actual existence in 1811-12. She is a theoretic possibility: what a woman might be if she combined independence and means of her own with intellect. Charlotte Brontë imagined a new form of power, equal to that of men, in a confident young woman [whose] extraordinary freedom has accustomed her to think for herself....Shirley [is] Brontë's most feminist novel."

 

 

Ah, I loved it ! Not as much as Jane Eyre, but Jane Eyre being my favourite novel of all times, I doubt one will ever reach its height in my opinion. However... I loved it ! 

 

Of course, I'm not the first one to make the comparison, but it made me think about North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell's novel took place in a big northern town while this one is in rural Yorkshire, however it's all about mills and new factory machines, how people revolt against it, yet a big importance is laid upon women and their place in society. I could hear Charlotte's own voice shining through many times in the novel, as a woman who wants to make something out of her life, not just stay home and bore herself to death mending stockings : 

"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. The great wish, the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live." Imagine Charlotte, who grew in a big family, now living alone with her ailing father, her siblings all dead, in this house with a view on the cemetery surrounded by wuthering winds ?

 

I loved Charlotte's sharp sense of humour - because there is humour : "Originality. Quick were they to recognize the signs of this evil ; and wherever they saw its trace — whether in look, word, or deed; whether they read it in the fresh, vigorous style of a book, or listened to it in interesting, unhackneyed, pure, expressive language — they shuddered, they recoiled. Danger was above their heads, peril about their steps. What was this strange thing ? Being unintelligible it must be bad."

 

This novel was filled with larger than life characters, humour, passion, reason too, I really had a great time reading it and will probably read it again some time in the future.

First sentence : "Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills ; every parish has one or more of them ; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." I would love to be able to see the face of her soon to be husband when he read this !