![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She doesn’t hold back from harsh remarks, and is particularly catty about the Flemish (actually the Walloons) versus the English in terms of housekeeping standards and dress sense. This is why I liked it so much.Ĭharlotte has too much anger in her to be a match for (for example) Dickens, when writing about English society in the recent past: he is genial, she is furious. I remembered autocratic Mr Helstone very well, and the three appalling curates, but where, I wondered, was Shirley? Why did she not appear in the first chapters? Where were the other women? Why was Mr Yorke such a professional Yorkshireman? (See what Charlotte did there?) With a wet weekend on my hands, I got stuck into Shirley while waiting for the summer to come back, and finished it with great enthusiasm. ![]() About four months ago I taught the first three chapters of Shirley, for a class on Condition of England novels, and was startled by how much I both remembered and had forgotten, just from that tiny section. When I first read Shirley, in my teens, I was looking for more Jane Eyre, and didn’t find it. Jane Eyre and Villette jostle for the position of my favourite Bronte book, but I even knew The Professor better than Shirley. For years, I’ve vaguely been aware that Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849) is the one novel of hers that I never read properly. ![]()
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