Shirley

There’s an idea that suffering creates a better artist, but I think this story by Charlotte Bronte proves otherwise. She began to write it when most of her family were alive; by the time she’d finished it, her brother and two sisters had died lingering deaths. The story begins well enough, but quickly descends into pathos and sentimentality – whole chapters dedicated to apostrophe - with all four main characters becoming depressed and ill near to death – but unlike Charlotte’s siblings, they all survive, find love, and lead happier lives.

The main character isn’t Shirley, but a girl called Caroline who falls in love with the local mill owner, a Frenchman related to her by marriage, and who spends the entire novel pining for him, until finally in the last chapter he proposes. This of course mirrors Charlotte’s love story, except that the Frenchman was married and she pined until another man proposed. Shirley turns up halfway through. She’s a great character for feminists to analyse – her name at that time was only for boys, she has an ongoing joke with the locals that she is a gentleman, and she is a very strong character. She ends up getting with a Frenchman too.

There’s more food for feminists, with a great deal of discussion about how bored women are, not having jobs, not being educated, not having lives outside hooking a husband. The female characters whinge about all of this, but then have no problem considering men superior, and calling them “master” – ugh! Sure, Jane Eyre does the same, but that starts from Rochester being her employer – it’s natural for her to call him sir, and she calls him Edward once they get together. Here Shirley calls her lover by his name until he proposes – then it’s master. Shudder! It’s almost as though Charlotte is shocked by her own feminism, or is afraid readers will be, and tries to placate them.

The background is ostensibly industrialisation. We may want to kill our bosses today, but back then the workers and employers were fighting real pitched battles – it’s unimaginable. This is the sort of book you read to realise how good we have it today, especially as women. I say it’s ostensibly that, because the background disappears pretty quickly and the focus becomes the misery of all the characters – chapters and chapters of misery. This book would’ve been a lot better had Charlotte’s siblings been immunised against TB. The initial chapters which detail Yorkshire life are really interesting and well done. But once she gets into sickness and depression it really bogs down. You can’t really cheer on the lovers because they just seem so boring, especially the men. That’s why Jane Eyre is so good – both Jane and Rochester are such bizarre, interesting, unusual people. The age difference doesn’t matter because they’re both as odd as the other, and that’s why they fall in love with one another. But here there’s chapters where the characters explain laboriously why they love one another, rather than Charlotte showing us.

Charlotte Bronte was definitely a brilliant writer, stylistically original – look at the way she moved from past to present tense to create immediacy, for example – but her other books (I’ve also read Villette) are nothing compared with Jane Eyre. I can’t help but think about all that those Brontes would have done if they’d had better health and more wealth. I can’t think of a more miserable bunch, and looking at Shirley, I can’t see it was worth it.