Summary
This 1859 novel, set during the Luddite riots, is centered on the character of Robert Moore, a mill-owner who, despite the outrage of his workers, introduces new machinery at his mill-an act that ends in violence. In an effort to recoup his losses, Moore courts Shirley Keeldar, an heiress, despite his love for his cousin Caroline, who is poor but who returns his feeling. Shirley, however, is not to be bought; she secretly loves Moore's impoverished brother, Louis, the family tutor. SHIRLEY is Charlotte Brontė's only overt work of social criticism, a protest against both the insensitivity of the mill-owners and the subservient position of women in the mid-1800's. The novel is more in the tradition of Brontė's friend Elizabeth Gaskell, whose fiction was frequently set against the background of the Industrial Revolution and its effects on rural workers.
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Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.75 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 1.4 pounds
Pages: 656
Publisher's Notes
Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontė 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 Brontės literary talent. "Shirley is a revolutionary novel," wrote Brontė biographer Lyndall Gordon. "Shirley follows Jane Eyre as a new exemplar--but so much a forerunner of the feminist of the later twentieth century that it is hard to believe in her actual existence in 1811-12. She is a theoretic possibility: what a woman might be if she combined independence and means of her own with intellect. Charlotte Brontė imagined a new form of power, equal to that of men, in a confident young woman [whose] extraordinary freedom has accustomed her to think for herself....Shirley [is] Brontės most feminist novel."The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Librarys seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
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