Brontë, Charlotte "Shirley" - 1849

 

Brontë, Charlotte "Shirley" - 1849

This is my tenth Classic Spin and we were given #2.

One cannot read anything by Charlotte Brontë without comparing it to "Jane Eyre". Whilst that novel was about a poor girl with no relatives to help her, the poor girl in this story has an uncle who raises her. And cousins who like her. And a rich friend. So, a completely different story, one could say.

However, Shirley and her friend Caroline also show us the situation of women in the 19^th century just as well as Jane Eyre. The story might not be as dramatic but it certainly is interesting. Charlotte Brontë shows quite a bit of humour in her narrative. Still, not my favourite.

From the back cover:

"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'."

Here are all the books on my original Classics Club list.
And here is a list of all the books I read with the Classics Spin.