My final verdict is this: If you like Bronte and other 19 th century novels, you’ll like Shirley as well – but it won’t be your favorite.Shirley is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. Bronte’s ending just kind of fixes itself all of a sudden – perhaps she had bored herself long enough? Who knows. No real action occurs until the last 100 pages or so. The first third of the story is fairly boring, doesn’t include the title character, and is forgotten for most of the last two/thirds. Unfortunately, the novel suffers from a lack of focus. Just when you think you’ve figured out who will end married to whom – you get thrown for a loop! The former is quietly strong, sincere, and caring – the latter fiercely stubborn, smart, and charismatic. You’ll fall in love with Caroline from the beginning just as you’ll fawn over Shirley once she is introduced somewhere after the first third of the novel. The novel’s strongest point is characterization. Meanwhile, we follow two female leads, Caroline and Shirley, as they navigate the murky waters of love and marriage. We also have the Napoleonic Wars as a backdrop. The novel centers around several social conflicts of the early 19 th century – labor disputes, the replacement of human workers with machines, women’s upward movement, and corruption of the clergy. Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills every parish has one or more of them they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good.Ĭolons, commas, and semi-colons, oh my! These kinds of sentences often put modern readers right off of reading any further, but I love them! Anyway, I’m sure you don’t care much about me waxing poetic the beauty of a well structured complex sentence.īronte wrote four novels in her lifetime and Shirley is perhaps the most ambitious and the least popular. Charlotte Bronte’s 1849 novel, Shirley, begins as follows:
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