nastya 's Reviews > Shirley

CHAPTER XXXV. WHEREIN MATTERS MAKE SOME PROGRESS, BUT NOT MUCH.

Charlotte attempted to broaden the scope, to touch on politics, economics, lower class, write from the close third person perspective from different men. And she failed spectacularly.

The only time this book is bearable is when it focuses on the friendship of two heroines and those are a few pages. Everything else is just laughable. The only good, poor character basically has the personality of a golden retriever. Every male character she writes sounds the same. The dialogue is ridiculous. Oh and the melodrama, the whole second half is never-ending ridiculous melodrama and for me to be able to appreciate it must be dialed up a notch. Go big, go The Monk levels, bring out the flying devil.

Also this is a supposedly social novel but really, what reality is this? Charlotte in the end of the day is interested in romance and this book has not one, but two! Both very badly written, but the more the better?

Still, it’s Charlotte, even when she’s judgemental and patronizing, she has a talent for readable prose. Until the dullness, boredom and ridiculousness hits you and you just pray for this book to end.

"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."
"Shirley, you chatter so, I can't fasten you. Be still. And, after all, authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes."
"Not at all. Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted. It will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's."
"To be sure. You could not write cleverly enough. You don't know enough. You are not learned, Shirley."
"God knows I can't contradict you, Cary; I'm as ignorant as a stone. There's one comfort, however: you are not much better."

(Great point in the beginning, but then I feel called out by her by the end.)

This sloppy novel just barely held together with very questionable scotch tape. Until it didn't.