The contrast between these two leading characters provides a view of the reality and the unequal potential of female existence in this period. Caroline, whose uneventful life, trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory, symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The book also features a second protagonist, the shy Caroline Helstone, who some believe was based on the author’s sister Anne.
Charlotte Brontë imagined a new form of power, equal to that of men, in a confident young woman extraordinary freedom has accustomed her to think for herself.’ This analysis indicates why Shirley is regarded as a remarkable feminist novel.
Shirley is independent minded and forceful, a new woman for the times.īrontë scholar Lyndall Gordon stated that Shirley presents ‘a theoretic possibility: what a woman might be if she combined independence and means of her own with intellect. Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell, who later became Brontë’s first biographer, that the character of Shirley was how she imagined her sister Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) might have turned out if she had the benefits of wealth and privilege. The narrative concerns the spirited heiress Shirley Keeldar, whose wealth liberates her from staid convention. It was also a time when industrialisation was changing the landscape and machines were taking over. Hurt by certain the criticisms of Jane Eye as being passionate and melodramatic, in her published second novel, Charlotte sought to create a work that was as ‘real, cool and solid unromantic as Monday morning.’ Shirley is set in the early part of the nineteenth century, during the Luddite riots and the last stages of the Napoleonic wars, which had been devastating for Yorkshire trade. Shirley is one of the lesser-known works of Charlotte Brontë (1816 -55), overshadowed somewhat by her blockbuster Jane Eyre, which is a shame because it is a fine novel with an engrossing narrative.
David Stuart Davies looks at the second published novel of Charlotte Brontë
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