Shirley

In the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1811, the woollen trade is in ruin. The Napoleonic wars have closed the markets, mills stand idle, and working men go hungry — while the manufacturer Robert Moore installs the new labour-saving machinery that will throw still more of them out of work. When his frames are smashed on the road and his mill is attacked by machine-breakers, the conflict of the age — capital against labour, the future against the past — breaks open in a quiet country valley.

Against this public crisis Charlotte Brontë sets a private one, and it is the one she cared about most. Caroline Helstone, the penniless niece of a stern clergyman, has no occupation and no prospect but marriage; when the man she loves keeps his distance, she begins the slow decline the age prescribed for unwanted women. Her friend Shirley Keeldar, an orphaned heiress, is rich, headstrong, and free — she runs her own estate and answers to no one. Side by side the two fates pose the novel's real question: what freedom does to a woman, and what its absence does.

Shirley is a different book from Jane Eyre. Where that novel burns inside a single first-person voice, this one steps back into the third person and surveys a whole community — clergymen and curates, mill-hands and heiresses — with irony and a wide historical eye. Written during the year that tuberculosis took Brontë's brother and both her sisters, it carries its grief quietly and keeps faith with its large public subject.

It is also one of Victorian fiction's boldest protests against the idleness forced on women — its appeal to fathers to give their daughters something real to do still reads as a living argument. And it left a curious mark on the world: before this book “Shirley” was a man's name, and it was the novel's heroine who made it a woman's.