Shirley
By: Charlotte Brontë.
Edition: 1997 Modern Library ed.
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 656
Subjects: Textile industry -- Fiction; Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815 -- Fiction; Women -- England -- Fiction; Yorkshire (England) -- Fiction
Description: Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Bronte 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.

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. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention. A work that combines social commentary with the more private preoccupations of Jane Eyre, Shirley demonstrates the full range of Bronte's literary talent.