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Shirley

  • Book
  • 1849
  • #Literature
Charlotte Brontë
@CharlotteBront
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
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4.1/5 439 ratings
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3.75/5 29.7k ratings
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Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that... Show More

Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë 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 Brontë's literary talent. "Shirley is a revolutionary novel," wrote Brontë 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 Brontë 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] Brontë's most feminist novel."

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 624

ISBN: 0141439866

ISBN-13: 9780141439860

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Dana Stevens @thehighsign · Sep 6, 2022
  • Answered to What's your favorite book that's over 600 pages?
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Either Villette or Shirley by Charlotte Brontë. I'm finishing the latter right now (as an audiobook wonderfully read by Georgina Sutton) & am sad that when it's over I will be out of CB novels to read.
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  • Rachel Syme
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    What's your favorite book that's over 600 pages?
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