Shirley is a not-quite-comfortable hybrid of a romance and an anti-silver fork novel, the latter as assuredly as Thackeray’s trenchantly sarcastic Vanity Fair, which is set during the same period. It is among the first of the industrial novels that demonstrate the desperation of the poor during the beginning of the industrial revolution’s inexorably swift changes. Bronte probably heard accounts from oldsters about troubles when the looms were being replaced by machines, and there was certainly trouble enough during her own time—there is a mid-Victorian flavor, a particularly middle-class outlook on history as well as economics, that doesn’t always accord with Regency accounts of same. For example, Bronte’s insistence that uprisings were always led by wily, unscrupulous outsiders, and not by angry, desperate people themselves.There is also a distinctly early Victorian veneration of Wellington, who in 1811 had a year to go before he attained the double promotion that made him into the hero who strode mightily through all the Bronte kids’ juvenilia antipodal to their various Byronic hero-villains. Alone out of all the Brontes’ published works, Wellington gets his veneration here, a year before his rise to national consciousness and popularity.As for the hybrid nature of the novel, it is also a harbinger of what Trollope and others would soon do in delving into ecclesiastical matters. There are a lot of clergymen of all kinds in this novel, good, bad, and a mix, as there is a lot of church politicking at the village level. Perhaps this preponderance of clergy was prompted by Bronte’s reaction to the horrified reviews of Jane Eyre that so grieved her, with their condemnations of the book’s immorality.Finally, then there is a sympathetic and protracted look into that most risible of figures, old maids—and at the same time, a pungent look at disastrous marriages, and the many reasons why they fail; though the early chapters feature men condemning women for rendering marriage hellish, the entire book breathes in answer from the female point of view.On the first page, the unnamed narrator insists that the book is not a romance, which is only partly true. Robert Moore is certainly not much of a hero, especially to modern audiences as he tramples all over Caroline’s faithful love through most of the book, in favor of his mill. Louis Moore, the secondary hero, doesn’t even enter the novel until well past half-way, and then mostly we hear about him, with a few scenes on stage. But those few scenes are delicious with the wit demonstrated in Jane Eyre, and in both brothers, though we see the Bronte Mark I Byronic hero (none of them could resist), here they are corseted strictly within acceptable Victorian tropes. There is a great deal of humor gleaming here and there, like Dr. Langweilig of the Moravian preachers (Langweilig = boring in German), and many wisecracking asides by the narrator.Even Bronte's insistence that the novel isn't a romance is tongue in cheek. The tropes of early Victorian romance are definitely there—the near-deathbed scene with the rejected heroine pining away, the sudden and dramatic revelation of a long-lost mother, a gunshot wound that renders the hero helpless to be tenderly taken care of, while he remorsefully counts up his sins and arises determined to be a better man to his long-suffering heroine.I think if one regards the novel as one of female agency built around female friendship, then the book’s disparate bits fall into place. Even those old maids gain agency when times are troubled by organizing social welfare to keep the desperately poor from starving. And there is a great deal about female education being crucial to success in life, whether as wives, mothers, managers of estates, or solitary women expected to live in service to others. (Bronte deals with that platitude with justified sarcasm in a laugh-out-loud bit of a scene.)Nor does Bronte forget the servants, many of whom have speaking roles in this novel. Bronte acknowledges the unseen work of servants, for example in disparaging the fine oak drawing room in Shirley Keeldar’s manor for the grim labor it requires of servants, scrubbing with bees-wax laden cloths.“Women read men more truly than men read women. I’ll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I have time, only it’ll never be inserted; it will be ‘declined with thanks’ and left for me at the publisher’s.”At the time this was written, Shirley was a masculine name. The use of it for a heroine signified another strong-willed female (Jane Eyre having previously been published to resounding success), and in that the reader is not disappointed. But the story is less Shirley Keeldar’s than it is Caroline Helstone’s. Some biographers feel that Shirley and Caroline are fictional depictions of Emily and Anne, who both died during Charlotte’s writing of the book. The eponymous Jane had come out of her in one white-hot session (which goes a way to explain the weird structure of the last quarter of the book), but this one took a protracted time to complete, as Charlotte dealt with, and then grieved over, these family deaths.If Caroline and Shirley do represent Anne and Emily, these are vastly idealized depictions. From anything I’ve read, poor Emily was stump-silent in social situations, uncomprehending of much social interaction and unable to deal, much preferring to escape entirely and tramp isolated through the countryside, the wilder the better. The distortions peopling Wuthering Heights, whose wild passions threw the Victorian reading world into a tizzy, indicate a fierce inner world, and a strong will fueling it. I wonder if we glimpse a bit of the real Emily not so much in Shirley’s masterful handling of servants, clergy, gentlemen, and nobles alike, but in her partisanship for every old and ugly dog she met.And in good, plain-spoken, unshakably honorable and moral, retiring and obedient little Caroline, we can see Anne in her silent struggles for faith—a struggle Charlotte would have recently seen in the poetry left behind in her dead sister’s papers. Each sister was given the devoted Byronic hero lover that neither had in real life, and above all is lovingly depicted the ardent and loyal friendship that I suspect does mirror the real bond those sisters shared until the end.
...but I perceive that certain sets of human beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise: they call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of the self? I do not believe it.This book is long, complicated, and polemical. It is full of numerous characters that are never proclaimed fully evil or utterly good, references that few modern readers would understand without the copious end notes, and bundles of plots weaving in and out of a myriad number of sociocultural subjects. The authors' views are as obvious in her text as the nose on your face; religion, politics, women's rights, you name it, she has something to say about it. Finally, what this all adds up to is not an adventure, nor a history, not even a treatise of various ideas on multifarious subject matters, but a romance, if that. I loved it.If history is both well written and well integrated into an intriguing yet formative fictional piece, I'll eat it up like cake. If characters and plots are sacrificed on the altar of theme and powerful insight, I'm all the happier. If my own personal views are presented in a form eloquent, intelligent, and explicit, better yet augmenting and honing my mind as my eye reads on, yes, I will cling to it in as biased a manner as I please. And, if it tickles my particular brand of humor, I will especially treasure it.Will this book please everyone? No, far from it. The author is far too wrapped within her own thoughts and intentions within these pages, and not even my love blinds me to the emphatic disagreements I had with the book as a result. As these disagreements are few and far between the wonderfully long passages of masterful insight, I don't mind them much. What matters far more to me are many places of brilliance, the brightest of them being the ingenious way with which the author treats gaslighting, that all too common and insidious mechanism that dominates relations between women and men; as if the truth of defining action and reaction lay solely within the latter's power while the former is left to rot in silence. 'It is not,' she resumed, much excited, - 'It is not that I hate you; you are a good sort of man: perhaps you mean well in your way; but we cannot suit: we are ever at variance. You annoy me with small meddling, with petty tyranny; you exasperate my temper, and make and keep me passionate. As to your small maxims, your narrow rules, your little prejudices, aversions, dogmas, bundle them off: Mr Sympson - go, offer them a sacrifice to the deity you worship; I'll none of them: I wash my hands of the lot. I walk by another creed, light, faith, and hope, than you.'I'm not surprised Woolf decried Charlotte Brontë within her A Room of One's Own for letting too much anger and indictment creep into her writing. I myself wonder at Brontë's fervent declamations, often uttered by female characters who later on act in complete opposition to their previously stated thoughts and feelings. Seemingly, perhaps, as this sort of idealism rarely results in a happy ending, at least for most suspenders of disbelief. Seemingly, as what matters is that Brontë did indeed pen her insight on paper that later was successfully published. She did exhaust most of her cutting wit and fine tuned psychological scalpel on the matter of women from infant to old maid, but there are men and children, poor and rich, politic and politic that may not be likable but always are true. ‘I must read Shakespeare?' 'You must have his spirit before you; you must hear his voice with your mind's ear; you must take some of his soul into yours.''With a view to making me better; is it to operate like a sermon?' 'It is to stir you; to give you new sensations. It is to make you feel your life strongly, not only your virtues, but your vicious, perverse points.’This book achieves exactly that.
What do You think about Shirley (2006)?
İngiliz Edebiyatı kadın yazarlarına hayranım. Nitekim C.Bronte benim en sevdiklerimden. Romantik bir roman beklemeyin demiş kendisi ama hele sonlara doğru içim sıcacık oldu. Ama kayalar kadar sert ve puruzlu bir kitap bu kitap. Bir yanda servet sahibi uzlaşılmaz Shirley Keeldar, diğer yanda narin ve guzel Caroline Helstone. Bir yanda fabrika sahibi karizmatik Robert Moore, diğer yanda onun hassas öğretmen kardeşi Louis Moore. Başkaldıran işçiler, eski anılar, İngiltere'nin Sanayileşme zamanları, Fransa ile savaşın yeni bittiği yıllar, gercekci tasvirler ve daha bir dolu güçlü kalem ibareleri... Jane Eyre daha çok ruhuma hitap ediyordu o yüzden 4 yıldız verdim. Bulan kaçırmasın bu kitabı. Sirada Vilette;)
—E. Chainey (Bookowski)
It's not exactly a novel in the usual 19th century sense. It pretty much lacks plot, changes direction several times, loses track of characters, runs on way too long and is used as a platform for a platter-load of mini-essays. And the title character first appears on page 274. So why 5 stars? Because it may be the most beautifully written work I've read. Every word is exactly chosen, exactly placed and adds to the cumulative effect of its sentence and paragraph. This may sound too precious or contrived, but for me at least–not so. What little I've read of Jane Austen has tended to annoy me. She's arch, distanced from her characters and on some level doesn't like most of them. Bronte, by contrast, can lambast a character with withering sarcasm and skewering satire, then go on to show that she has an abiding fondness for their inner being.Something I didn't know previously: "Shirley" was originally a man's name, which Bronte deliberately gave to an extremely strong female character. She was making a point here, and made it so successfully that the novel actually changed the gender of the name from that time. Caroline is the heroine of the first 273 pages, and was probably intended to be the major character throughout, but Shirley, once introduced, took over. Robert, Caroline's idolized cousin and overburdened mill-owner, starts off rather unlikable but ends up ... well, until the last section he's pretty much ignored, shoved into the background. When he returns, the last 100 pages or so drag with a succession of gorgeously written but over-the-top romantic dialogues among Caroline, Robert, Shirley and Robert's brother. You could put it down at this point – you know how it's going to end. Early social commentary - brilliant stuff, by the way; Bronte's little essays on society, class structure and war rank with anything out there - peters out, and what looks like exploding class struggle over the mill fizzles out like a damp fire cracker. Yes, structurally it's a mess. But what a magnificent mess.
—Derek Davis
This is actually my favorite of all of Charlotte's books, and despite the general stance that it isn't as well developed or polished as her other works I actually find it very mature and by far the most epic and social in its scope. Though not on par with MIDDLEMARCH it is in a similar vein, with hints of Hugo and Dickens in both the subject matter and cast of characters. All three of the principles are compelling, finely drawn folks and Catherine's transformation, the most complete arc in the novel, is acutely etched and deeply satisfying: she earns the man she loves in a way that seems rarely depicted in literature of this time period. Without a doubt is the book given to moments of melodrama but it also manages to keep its head above the gothic trappings Bronte makes so intrinsic to her other works. A compelling, thought provoking read that lingers with you for a long time afterwards.
—Stuart
