Paul's Reviews > Shirley

4.5 stars
This was Charlotte Bronte’s second novel, written over the period when her three siblings died. This is a historical novel set in 1811-12 during the period of the Napoleonic wars. It was also set during an industrial depression where many workers were being laid off. New machinery was replacing people and this machinery was being destroyed by the Luddites. The locations (country house wise) and some of the events are based on historical events.
An interesting note: up to this point Shirley had been a man’s name and it was Bronte’s use of Shirley for the name of the main character which led to Shirley to primarily a female name. This novel has a third person narrator, unlike Bronte’s other two novels.
Relationships between the sexes is a major focus in Shirley and especially men’s expectations of women:
“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.”
Although there is a fair amount of romance in the novel and you can’t really escape it in the last quarter, but as the narrator points out there is more to it:
“If you think, from this 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.”
There is an element of this being a “condition of England” novel and there were others around by Gaskell, Disraeli and Carlyle. There are descriptions of Luddite disturbances, but as Carlyle says of the working class:
“that great dumb toiling class which cannot speak”
They don’t really get a voice here either, what they do say is laced with what is perceived to be religious and political extremism. The real solution to the problems here is (like many other Victorian novels) a sort of laissez-faire paternalism where the enlightened middle classes do what’s right by the poor ignorant workers. That’s very important to Bronte here, there is a distinct contrast between the good and bad clergy and between good and bad mill owners.
As a result of all this the novel is many-layered and the characters interesting and sometimes contradictory. There are plots and sub-plots meandering around and the analysis of gender relations is very good