Shirley

Abstract

Shirley represents a significant departure from the style and concerns of Jane Eyre and in many respects this second published novel lacks the intensity, unity and resolution of the first. It is transparently schematic, fraught with conflicting impulses and it frequently betrays the effort of composition. Paradoxically, though, the very qualities that might seem in one sense the least satisfying are in another the things that make Shirley a most intriguing novel and one that sheds a revealing light on Charlotte Brontë’s development as a woman and a writer.

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. (S 352)