I finished reading Charlotte Brontë's Shirley over the weekend. It's a book I can really appreciate, particularly the more I read about it, but it is not one I think I can call a favorite (especially compared to Jane Eyre and the possibilities of yet unread Villette). It's a historical novel and a very topical one. Brontë dealt not only with women's issues but also with the Luddite rebellion and the Napoleonic Wars. It sounded quite promising, but I felt the story didn't quite live up to the scope of her agenda. She wrote the novel in 1848-49, though the events are set in Yorkshire in 1811-12. Interestingly over the course of writing the book she lost all three of her siblings. Jane Eyre was her first novel, which she published as Currer Bell, but by the time Shirley was published she had been unmasked as a woman writer.
This is a wonderful novel to study actually, to get a good look at the Victorian period from the perspective of a developing writer, a woman writer particularly. There are lots of ideas swimming around in the novel and lots to think about. The editor wrote an insightful introduction, and I think I will share a few quotes with you.
"Shirley is not Charlotte Brontë's best book. It is less compulsively readable than Jane Eyre and less original than Villette. Yet there is more of the warp and woof of her life in it then in any of her other novels. This is owing not just to the dreadful immediate events that interrupted the novel's composition--the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne over the course of nine months--but to Bronte's assumption of her new identity as the admired, if sharply criticized, author of Jane Eyre while she was conceiving and writing Shirley."
Charlotte Brontë was making decent money and travelling at this time. She was having significant relationships with men and women outside her own family. In this novel Charlotte's "own character would be expressed in every page."
A lot happens in this story, so it's hard to describe it in just a few sentences, but it revolves mainly around four characters. Robert Moore is a mill-owner who wants to improve and mechanize his business through the use of machines. Of course this doesn't go down well with the mill workers who fear losing their jobs in difficult financial times. The textile trade has been seriously hampered due to the war with France, so everyone is hurting. Caroline Helstone is a distant relative of Robert's, and she's in love with him, though he seems to have little time to spare for her. She is a poor young woman who lives with her uncle, a curate.
Shirley Keeldar is a wealthy heiress who doesn't even make an appearance in the story for at least a hundred pages. When she does, however, she and Caroline became instant and good friends. Shirley is concerned with doing good works in the community and has little desire to marry, though she is often proposed to by many suitors. Robert's brother Louis will make an even later appearance. He was once Shirley's tutor, and now teaches Shirley's young cousin. Each character has an important part to play in the story, and I was impressed by the juxtaposition of characters and contrasts between situations, though at times things felt a bit disjointed.
"In Shirley, [Heather] Glen points out, the 'issues of the day'--Luddite insurrection, the position of women, the progress of war with France--appear not as unmediated 'facts' but as objects of discussion and report. This helps to explain the presence of so many distinctive voices, idioms, and discourses competing for attention and prominence in Shirley as well as the untranslated French dialogue and, sometimes, narrative aperçus. Brontë worried that the inclusion of so much French would have a 'pretentious air, but she remained committed to letting her characters speak their native French whenever an English translation was inexact in its feeling or connotation."
While all this local flavor adds to a story, I also struggled with it at times as well. Despite what didn't work for me with the novel, I am glad I read it. It's a worthy read if you are willing to invest time and effort in it. I think what I take away from it is the view of the author behind the novel and her responses to the period when she was writing. I may have to read Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton at some point, which deals with some of the same social issues. Gaskell was not only Brontë's friend, but her first biographer too. I've asked for a general biography of The Brontës for Christmas, and I plan on continuing to read more about and by them.