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    Shirley
    Shirley
    Shirley
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Shirley

    Written by Charlotte Brontë

    Narrated by Lia Williams

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    This novel depicts a mill owner, Robert, whose business is struggling and in turn rejects his attraction to an orphaned woman, Carolne, in favour of proposing to a rich landowner, Shirley. In Charlotte Bronte’s classic Shirley rejects him as she loves Robert’s poor brother, Louis, but has too much pride to admit her feelings. Caroline withers away due to the rejection by Robert until discovering Shirley’s governess is her long lost mother which rekindles her life. Robert’s obsession with profits means he ignores his workers needs until he is shot by an opposing faction. His experience at relying entirely on other people lead him to realise his mistakes and as his business picks up he helps his workers and reignites his attraction to Caroline. Shirley and Louis overcome their differences to begin speaking to one another in hope of an eventual marriage. Lia Williams, a remarkable talent, reads this English classic
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Copyright Group
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781780001555
    Author

    Charlotte Brontë

    Charlotte Brontë, born in 1816, was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters, and one of the nineteenth century's greatest novelists. She is the author of Villette, The Professor, several collections of poetry, and Jane Eyre, one of English literature's most beloved classics. She died in 1855.

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    Reviews for Shirley

    3.5/5

    589 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The story was read with a Yorkshire accent as was required and a French one. Both were convincingly believable and enhanced the enjoyment of the listening. Shirley was written as a backdrop to the working class uprisings in the North and the book has more details about this aspect of the novel than what was read here. For a pleasant listen this works but it is by no means the unabridged version so for academics this might not work except a loose overview of the plot.
    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this -- and I did like some aspects very much. However, those were not enough to balance out the unreasonable (and to my mind, unrealistic) characters and the too frequent passages that bored me.

      What I liked: the setting (early 1800s in northern England), the part of the plot about the mill owners versus the workers, some of the romance

      What I disliked: Caroline's weak character; Shirley demanding a man who can master her!! and she is also very weak in her dealings with Louis; the style of the writing especially in the descriptive passages. I also found the ending unconvincing.

    • 3/5
      As the author warned us, this book would be full of people who we don't like. Some of the most consarned-est Humans ever born live in this little part of York. There is Daniel Malone, a curate so full of himself; Mrs. Yorke--ugh, the meanest, most undeserving mother of nice husband and kids; and many more. The notes, since this deals with the early 19th century, and we don't know the literary and historical references, are mostly as Greek to me, since for most of them, you would have to further look up stuff in the Bible. No thank you. However, the author so understands human emotions and so values natural beauty and so craftingly shares this with us, her Reader, and even talks to us as if she knows us, that I will forgive her the crazy Greek notes, and say thank you, Charlotte Bronte, for a beautiful work.
    • 5/5
      There is only about 30 years between the time of Jane Austen and that of Charlotte Brontë, and yet the economic outlook for women was entirely different. Shirley was only Charlotte Brontë's second novel. Many readers and critics consider it a less successful novel, but this seems a bit unfair.

      Shirley ends with a double marriage, but they aren't marriages of romantic love. In Austen's novels attraction between men and women is often compared to manneristic dance movements, in Shirley it remains unclear to the very end which pairs are formed, an outcome quite unexpected.

      In the time of Jane Austen, women from less well-to-do families set their eyes on marrying a man of wealth or at least a parson. In Charlotte Brontë's time this is very different. First of all, women could go out and work as governesses and provide for themselves. This is what one of the main characters, Caroline Helstone intends to do, although there is some doubt as to her abilities. Half-way through the novel, Caroline is spared this fate, as Mrs Pryor seems willing to care for her in exchange for companionship. Her motivation seems to be purely out of sympathy, although it is later revealed that she is actually Caroline's mother.

      The other main character in the novel is a very different kind of woman. Where Caroline appears meek, Shirley Keeldar is entrepreneurial, a very strong woman. The prominence of Shirley in the novel also gives the novel a feminist characteristic.

      Although large parts of the novel, and surely the first 400 pages make for fast and exciting reading, the final 200 pages seem a bit tiresome. Part of the excitement of the novel is the late introduction of Shirley Keeldar, who doesn't appear until after about 250 pages. The last 250 pages of the novel give meticulous descriptions of a large number of other characters who appear on the sidelines of Caroline's life. Instead of a novel of manners, it seems to be a study of character.

      The historic setting of the novel is appealing and interesting, in the sense that it indicates a transition from a rural economy with landed gentry to the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The plot of the novel is situation at the moment where the industrial revolution is about to begin, and country folk rebel against it, trying to stop its development. Perhaps in describing the rustic characters Charlotte Brontë was trying to capture a world that was about to vanish, while she welcomed the new age with the strongest characters, recognizing that the new age would usher in many new developments that would in the end benefit women toward more independent lives.

      Besides description of character, Shirley is also a novel of exquisite description of the landscape in western Yorkshire.
    • 2/5
      Boring, and the "hero" is horrible.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      The first chapter of Shirley ("Levitical") hooked me. Nineteenth-century Church of England politics? Yes, please! But the rest of the novel doesn't quite deliver, on that or any other score. Brontë's prose is so pleasant to read that I stayed engaged and ultimately persevered with the book over the course of a few months, but I don't think I'd repeat the experience; I just didn't care about the characters quite enough.
    • 3/5
      This was the second novel by Charlotte Bronte, but I didn't find this anywhere near as interesting as Jane Eyre (or indeed the other three Bronte novels by Emily and Anne). While set in an interesting historical period, the economic depression following the Napoleonic wars and the era of Luddite opposition to industrialisation, this was only a minor part of the backdrop and nowhere near as vivid as the description of industrial strife and economic hardship in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, which I read last autumn. The title character was not really the most prominent one (she wasn't mentioned until nearly a third of the way through) and I can't say I found any of the main quartet especially interesting, though there was some amusing sharp dialogue between Shirley and her uncle. The minor character of schoolboy Martin Yorke was also quite funny. Overall, definitely my least favourite Bronte novel.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Brontë showing her mastery by dropping twenty different styles on the reader, almost like a prose collage.
    • 2/5
      Not as intriguing as I would have thought.

      For me, nothing special. It was OK.
    • 3/5
      Slow read. At first it is a social commentary about the changes brought on by new technology. The mill owner who needs to innovate to stay in business vs. the workers who will lose there jobs.

      Shirley arrives and it is about the position of women.

      Then at the end it is a love story.
    • 3/5
      Probably a revolutionary novel at print, but a rather long, slow read in the 21st century. Shirley, the character, doesn’t make an appearance until a quarter way in. Shirley is an heiress who makes friends with Caroline a self-effacing young woman in love with her mill-owning but near-bankrupt (because of the Napoleonic war) cousin.

      Bronte’s novel touches on war, politics, trade, unemployment through mechanisation, & the role of women struggling in a patriarchal society. All fascinating stuff, but this modern reader longed for a tighter structure & a stricter editor to speed the pace & lose some of its 700 sometimes indulgent pages.
    • 2/5
      I did not like Shirley.

      That could be my entire review. After reading a novel that was at least 200 pages too long, it probably should be. Because it is late and I am not feeling too charitable towards Charlotte Bronte I will make this brief.

      There were many things I disliked about Shirley (★★) but the one thing that I did like was the character of Shirley. Where Shirley was lively and engaging, the other characters were dull, overwrought and over described. I may be in the minority but I think it is a huge problem if the eponymous character does not show up in your story until page 187. Once she did show up she gave everything a much needed jolt of life, including this reader. Honestly, I can’t believe I made it to page 187. I was very close many times to abandoning the book. I didn’t but I can’t say that I’m glad I didn’t.

      After reading the brilliance of Anne Bronte’ masterpiece, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley read like an author trying too hard. I should give Charlotte some slack since she lost her three siblings while writing Shirley (including Anne, *sniff*) but I cannot. Especially after learning that Charlotte repressed Anne’s work after she died. It infuriates me that Charlotte and Emily are well-know two hundred years later while Anne, who had much more to say and said it much better, was silenced. I admit I am biased against Charlotte because of it. I cannot help it.

      Even if I did not have that prejudice I would not like Shirley. The language was pedantic, the characters annoying and the storyline meandered around searching for a social cause to champion. Unlike Bronte’s contemporary, Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote brilliant novels about industrialization and the subsequent social struggles, it seems obvious that Bronte had no real experience or knowledge of the lower classes, only what she read in the newspaper. Even without first hand knowledge a writer of Charlotte Bronte’s caliber (at least the caliber she thought she was) should have been able to make her point eloquently. If she had a social point to make, I missed it. Or maybe after slogging through 600 pages I didn’t care.
    • 5/5
      Five reasons why I liked "Shirley":

      Free-spirited Shirley: Miss Keeldar is a great heroine. Charlotte Brontë have enriched Shirley with great wealth, she’s a land owner and independent, which means she can speak against the corrupt curates, help the mill owner - start a social reform program for the poor - and in one of the best scenes of the novel go against her uncle when he thinks he has found the best match for her. Just brilliant.

      Luddites uprising: The novels first chapters takes us right into the historical setting (1811-12) in Yorkshire during the Napoleonic Wars where the poor workers try to attack and kill the mill owner, Robert Moore, because he’s replacing workers with new industrialised equipment. A very interesting conflict that’s the background for the two romantic plots.

      Women’s role in society: The novel have several interesting discussions on women’s emancipation - We empathize with Caroline Helstone and the constraints society puts on her - she has limited possibilities in life without parents and dependent on a fickle uncle - and marriage seems out of reach. Shirley on the other hand embraces her economic and social independence which defies conventions and expectations.

      Enduring friendship: The deepening and beautiful friendship between Caroline and Shirley is a great pleasure to follow. They have altogether different temperaments and characters - yet support and help each other throughout the novel.

      “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” Headline for this chapter with Caroline on her deathbed. I can still remember walking and listening to it with both fascination and trembling - and it reveals one of Charlotte Brontë's famous plot twists. It’s haunting with gothic elements - and no doubt influenced by her own life experience. Three of Charlotte Brontë’s siblings died during the writing of this novel (all wihtin nine months). First her alcoholic brother, Bramwell, and then shortly after each other, Emily and Anne.
    • 2/5
      Approaching “Shirley” for a second time, after first reading it six years previously, I realised that I remembered little about it yet seemed to think I’d enjoyed it. In retrospect, had I remembered more about it, I wouldn’t have returned for another read.

      This surprised me, actually, as when I re-read Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette” and “The Professor” I appreciated them both more after a second reading.

      Having checked some of the other Goodreads’ reviews of “Shirley” it seems to be a book that you either love or hate. I wouldn’t go as far as stating that I hate it. As the two-star rating suggests, I thought it was “okay”, but the good parts are hard to find in this mundane tome.

      The elements that appeal to me are few. Seldom did I find myself engaged with what the author had to offer. I did like some of the characters, such as Caroline, the Moore brothers, Malone, young Martin, and Shirley herself, but none of these were of a classic or memorable mould.

      One of the few interesting scenarios I liked was the part where young Martin Yorke comes to the fore. His interaction with Caroline was engaging. Can’t say too much more in case I reveal a spoiler, but this section adds a different slant to the novel for a short while.

      Wish I could mention further positive points, as I am a fan of Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne, but of the seven novels produced between them, “Shirley” is the only one I’d never read again.

      One of the main reasons I have such a low opinion of this book is owing to the third person narrator rambling on and on, boring me stupid with chapters like “Mr Yorke”, which is an elongated description about the man’s personality and appearance that could’ve been whittled down to a short paragraph.

      I always hate it when authors write endless explanations of what a character is like, *telling* us all about them, when they could’ve served the reader far better by *showing* us what the character is like through dramatizing scenes. The amount of telling as opposed to showing is one of this novel’s let-downs.

      Another negative aspect is the excessive amount of characters. Had Charlotte halved the amount of actors it would’ve made a positive difference.

      A further let-down, albeit not too frequent but often enough to draw attention to, is unrealistic dialogue. This quote of Caroline addressing Martin at his father’s gate is a prime example:

      > “But here we must part; we are at your father’s gate.”<

      In reality, if two or more people arrive at a destination that they’re all familiar with, no one among them would state where they were.

      For example, a brother visiting his mother’s house with his sister would not, upon reaching the front door and poised to knock, state to her, “We’re at mother’s house.” His sister would think him an idiot if he did.

      On the same principle, in “Shirley”, when Caroline arrives with Martin at his father’s gate, Caroline would not say to Martin, “We are at your father’s gate.”

      Other authors are guilty of this sort of silly writing. Such information when sounding unnatural in dialogue should be conveyed via the narrative. Charlotte’s guilty of this on several occasions, which is a shame when she had the ability to shine like a genius.

      What I dislike intensely in “Shirley” is this kind of thing:

      >“Mauvaise tête vous-même; je ne fais que mon devoir; quant à vos lourdauds de paysans, je m’en moque!”
      “En ravanche, mon garçon, nos lourdauds de paysans se moqueront de toi; sois en certain,” replied Yorke, speaking with nearly as pure a French accent as Gérard Moore.
      “C’est bon! c’est bon! Et puisque cela m’est égal, que mes amis ne s’en inquiètent pas.”
      “Tes amis! Où sont-ils, tes amis?”
      “Je fais écho, où sont-ils? et je suis fort aise que l’écho seul y répond. Au diable les amis! Je me souviens encore du moment où mon père et mes oncles Gérard appellèrent autour d’eux leurs amis, et Dieu sait si les amis se sont empressés d’accourir à leur secours! Tenez, M. Yorke, ce mot, ami, m’irrite trop; ne m’en parlez plus.”
      “Comme tu voudras.”<

      Although I’m very much pro-language-learning, when I read a book written in English, I don’t expect to encounter a language I don’t understand. CB does this in her other novels too. Other authors are guilty for doing so as well. To me it’s a form of arrogance, as if to say, “I can speak a second language. If you cannot, reader, then you are inferior.”

      In fact, the following quote suggests that the author (I should state “narrator” but Charlotte decides what makes it to the page) feels that she’s more knowledgeable than most and therefore mustn’t forget the percentage of readers who haven’t attained her level of intellect:

      >He proceeded to recite the following. He gave it in French, but we must translate, on pain of being unintelligible to some readers.<

      Pity she didn’t translate it all. It’s too much to assume that because you’ve made the efforts to learn a language and want to show it off, so too should the rest of the world.

      Judging by the following quote, the reader suddenly assumes the author has realised it’s time to stop showing off her linguistic skills because she’s alienating members of her audience who’d like to know what the hell’s happening:

      >At length, however, a window opened, and a female voice called to him, —
      “Eh, bien! Tu ne déjeûnes pas ce matin?”
      The answer, and the rest of the conversation, was in French; but as this is an English book, I shall translate it into English.<

      If only this principle could’ve been maintained, but alas! The author’s desire to display her skills of the French language continue to reoccur, leaving those of us who are not gifted in this tongue to guess or skip events in hope we aren’t passing over anything vital to the story.

      Just one more quote on this topic and I’ll desist in my rant:

      >she bent her head et les effleura de ses lèvres. (I put that in French because the word effleurer is an exquisite word.)<

      Well, Charlotte, “effleurer” most probably is an exquisite word, but the problem is, I haven’t a clue what it or the entire phrase means. As a result you’ve lost contact with a reader, which is a sin no author should be guilty of.

      On the whole, “Shirley” is a book with patches of good writing, but with too little happening among too many pages, with too much telling instead of showing, too much rambling from the third-person narrator, too many characters, some unnatural-sounding dialogue, and far too much French language.
    • 3/5
      I think this is the only Charlotte Bronte I hadn't read years ago. A book of its time. Quite frustrating at points with all the talking around relationships as opposed to actually straight up discussion of them. Love quadrangle. Labour aspects reminded me of Elizabeth Gaskell. Shirley herself was irritating and didn't appear until about a third of the way through which bothered me more than it should. Had no trouble getting through more than 600 pages so clearly my review is a bit harsh!
    • 3/5
      This is an odd book. It's sort of two books stitched together, only the join shows really badly. Initially it seems as if it is going to be one of those novels that portrays the life of the working poor, the struggles they had to survive and the impact of the march of progress (introduction of mill machinery etc) has on their life. And it heads down hat route for a reasonable time, then suddenly does a dramatic right turn and becomes a middle class romance. Very odd.
      Shirley herself doesn't appear until we're at volume 2, the first third is solidly in historical state of the nation territory. Once Shirley makes her appearance, with her fortune, to boot, it takes a somewhat different turn. She is viewed by a number of men as their meal ticket, only she has ideas about who she will wed herself. That all shakes out in the final third, by which time the poor suffering mill workers and the noble poor have vanished into the background, never to be seen again.
      It has its moments, but it certainly doesn't hang together well as a whole.
    • 4/5
      People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world; the demand disturbs the happy and rich...

      Shirley may be a disappointment to readers expecting a romance of the same caliber as Jane Eyre. The titular character doesn't appear until well into the novel, and she never fully wrests the position of protagonist from Caroline Helstone. Bronte resorts to the device of a journal to reveal one character's innermost thoughts since that person is without a natural confidante among the other characters.

      Shirley holds more interest as a social novel addressing issues of social, economic, and gender equity. The depression of 1811-1812 provides the backdrop for the action. It pits textile mill operator Robert Moore and others of his station against desperate unemployed mill workers. Both orphan Caroline Helstone, a dependent of her clergyman uncle, and heiress Shirley Keeldar are reluctant to accept the roles assigned to them as single women of marriageable age. Shirley's inheritance allows her to openly defy society's expectations, while Caroline's lack of options as her uncle's dependent is at least a partial cause of her mental and physical depression. Recommended particularly for readers with an interest in women's history/women's rights or 19th century English social history.
    • 4/5
      Set during the Napoleonic wars, Shirley is partially a story of economics and industrialization. It's also partially a love story. Religion also plays a part in the novel. There is a reason it has stood the test of time. The characters are very strong, and one can truly get a feel for the era in which the novel is set.
    • 4/5
      Well, for my 500th read book on goodreads, I decided to pick something that I'd been saving for a while, and I settled on Shirley, which was the last Charlotte Brontë novel I had left to read.

      Shirley is full of my favorite Charlotte Brontë things, namely feminist social agitation and characters who step outside their expected gender roles. Shirley is obviously the best part of Shirley--she deserves a spot on the list of greatest characters of all time. Supposedly Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that Shirley was what her sister Emily would have been "had she been placed in health and prosperity," but my unvetted personal opinion is that Shirley is what Jane Eyre would have been had she been placed in health and prosperity.

      Shirley is not going to displace my current favorite Brontë novel (that would be hard to do), but it does seem like the novel that has the most of Charlotte in it, and for that reason alone it is worthy of being loved. Through the book there's also this undercurrent of desire to return to an earlier, happier time, which, when you think about how all the remaining Brontë siblings died while Shirley was being written, makes the book feel sadder than it appears on the surface.
    • 3/5
      Unfortunately, this is no Jane Eyre. But if you want to spend 25 hours listening to a marriage plot where the heroines waste away because of unrequited love, then this might be the book for you. I was disappointed at the sexism in this book. Jane Eyre is such a great heroine and one of the things I really liked it that she is one of the plain-looking heroines in the classics - or any book for that matter. In this story, two of the main women characters, Shirley and Caroline Helstone are both beautiful and the men constantly harp about their appearance. Maybe it reflects the values of that century, but I felt that feminism really took a step backward with this book.
    • 4/5
      Maybe the less romantic novel by Charlotte, but her most mature work, an account of the changing times in the early XIXth century.
      The story follows the lives of four main characters. Miss Helstone, a young woman with no prospects, niece of a Curate in Yorkshire, her serious cousin Mr. Moore, a businessman who struggles to earn his living, Miss Shirley, a spirited heiress of a great fortune and her tutor Mr. Moore's brother, Louis.
      Being a Brontë's novel though, there's not one, but two romances going on, presented in the most extravagant way and what makes the novel even more compelling is that its characters have flaws and make mistakes and learn their way along the way with the reader.
      In the end, we find realistic characters who fight to find their position in the world, each in their own way, the story being a faithful portrait of women searching for independence and men challenging the order of the old regime.
      I think that Charlotte used Shirley and Miss Caroline Helstone to speak her mind in several subjects such as politics or religion and that these two characters, being both so different from each other, where what Charlotte Brontë would have liked to be in her real life. Miss Helsonte, pious, humble and full of patience and good sense, is able to win over her man's heart. Shirley, with her strong character and of independent means, who is bold enough to speak her mind about business and politics with men, manages to marry who she chooses (and I'm sure Charlotte would have liked to be able to do that!!).
      I could also glimpse Elisabeth Gaskell's influence in this work, the subject of industrialisation reminded me of "North & South" and the story had many similarities about the peripheral characters and the problems they had to deal with.
      All in all, a rewarding reading with great final chapters which close the novel with a bitter sweet taste.
      Don't be mistaken though, this is no Jane Eyre, so don't expect accelerated pulse and breathtaking dialogues because you won't find them in here.

      Some quotations:

      "I will never be where you would not wish me to be, nor see nor hear what you wish unseen and unheard"

      " 'Never! We will remember that with what measure we mete it shall be measured unto us, and so we will give no scorn, only affection'
      ' Which won't satisfy, I warn you of that. Something besides affection - something far stronger, sweeter, warmer - will be demanded one day. Is it there to give?' "

      "Am I to die without you, or am I to live for you?"
    • 4/5
      A meandering but enjoyable story. It covers the friendship and love lives of several people in an English community. Unrest among the local people occurs when the local textile mill begins to industrialize, which makes for some intense confrontations. Shirley is the title character, but a for a good deal of the book she is no where to be seen. Still enjoyed everyone else's stories though!
    • 1/5
      I battled with myself through the first two thirds of the book to keep reading, and it was only a day stuck ill in bed that gave me the opportunity to finish it. I suppose the foreword gave me plenty of warning, claiming that the book is as “unromantic as a Monday morning”, but still.

      Shirley is set in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the early nineteenth century, in a collection of villages suffering religious division, economic hardship due to the Napoleonic War and the start of industrialisation of the traditional cloth-making trade. We follow the rector’s niece Caroline through a year of her life as she falls in love with her Belgian mill-owning cousin, deals with her uncle’s inattention, meets and befriends a newcomer to the neighbour (Shirley herself – she doesn’t feature until at least 1/3 of the way through the book, which left me wondering if I’d missed something for the first 100 pages or whether the book should actually be called Caroline), becomes gravely ill, discovers who her mother is, and eventually comes to a happy ending. No huge plot spoilers there, I think – I suspect one rather needs the outline in order to understand what’s going on!

      This was everything that Jane Eyre managed to steer just clear of: unnecessarily verbose, with pathetic girls falling in love and pining to death’s door, and with a cast significantly larger than one could really track comfortably.

      It gets a 2/10 rather than a 1/10 partly because the writing is still elegant, and partly because there is a relatively satisfactory conclusion to the whole charade and thus a pleasing arc in the storyline. Still – not worth the hours.
    • 4/5
      My favorite Bronte book. Not so dark and lonely as Jane Eyre (never really liked the Mrs. Rochester part) or Villette (never liked her delusions.) Shirley is an interesting character, a strong woman who makes her own, unconventional decisions in the face of a very convention-bound society. The hero (Robert) isn't perfect.
    • 5/5
      There are several well-written reviews below that state my thoughts better than I am able to at the moment. I would just like to add that for readers who expect another Jane Eyre when beginning Shirley should be warned that it is a very different type of book that Charlotte Bronte set out to write and what she accomplishes is marvelous. It is lengthy and seem incoherent or contradictory at times, but it bears a second close reading (like any well-written book, really) to understand better what Bronte is getting at. Hated it upon first reading, loved it after the second.
    • 3/5
      Shirley is Charlotte Bronte's only historical novel and in that 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 spent as a governess; her longing for a better past.

      Shirley is not Charlotte Bronte's best book in the sense that it is less compulsively readable than Jane Eyre (I should note that I have read enjoyed Jane Eyre several times over the years and it is one of my favorite novels). Perhaps the lack of readability is because it is constructed in large part to make certain social statements, in the mode of Dickens, rather than written with a more singular focus on the romantic aspects of the plot (Shirley suffers when compared to most of Dickens' novels). Bronte does, however, express herself with great beauty in certain passages and demonstrates her character: her conviction that women might be as well qualified as men to practice a profession (which sets her apart from most of her own contemporaries); her contempt for the market of marriage; and her experience.
      The book is worth reading and for some readers may resonate more positively than it did for me.
    • 4/5
      This book was ok, but perhaps overlong and a bit hit and miss. I admired Shirley herself, and the fact that she was unconventional and didn't automatically marry the "most eligible" man.
    • 5/5
      have read several times. well-written