The story is about Shirley Keeldar, an heiress worth thousands of pounds, and her best friend Caroline Helstone, the local minister's niece, and how they end up marrying a pair of brothers. Factory owners were buying newly invented machinery to save production costs, but the workers who lost their jobs were starving, angry, and resentful. The backdrop is the Industrial Revolution, nowhere more turbulent than in Yorkshire. I found my opinions fluctuating, and I'll explain why.įirst a quick summary. There were two love stories in this novel, but you might wonder how it stands up against her more famous classic, Jane Eyre. This is my romance choice for the 2017 Back to the Classics challenge.Ĭharlotte Bronte sure knew how to write a sizzling romance. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on 'something real and unromantic as Monday morning.' Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines.

Shirley by charlotte brontë