Shirley

Gha i couldn't stop, I gulped up the last part of the book way to fast. It was just so intriguing and fascinating. I loved the well formed characters and the beautiful writing. Even if the book was slow and not much happening I didn't get bored. This is a book you should take in slowly to get fully emersed in the story, however I flew through it. I love the fact that Charlotte Bronte talks to the reader through the page time to time. It feelt very engaging. I enjoyed this far more then Jane Eyre

3.5 or 4 stars.

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

"Unromantic," Charlotte? What are you on about? This is

the most straightforwardly romantic of any Brontë novel:

it even ends with a Jane Austen-esque double wedding

!

By far Charlotte’s weakest novel, and the only Brontë novel I have zero desire to re-read (I’m not counting

The Professor, which I have yet to read, because it wasn’t published in Charlotte’s lifetime). Perhaps this is because it lacks some of the key elements I love most about the Brontë’s work: It’s much more externally focused, and the choice to write in third person puts quite a bit of distance between the reader and the characters, whom Charlotte spends a lot of time

telling us about rather than allowing us to hear their internal monologues or even draw our own conclusions based on their actions. It’s the least gothic of any Brontë novel, and instead has a very upbeat, springtime feel—not inherently a bad thing, but not really what I was expecting or hoping for. Structurally, it’s very uneven, with large sections that focus on side characters and probably should have just been cut. And as for the extremely wide cast of characters, while multi-layered and complex, they simply are not as interesting as those from other nove (aside from Shirley herself).

It’s also just far too long, as it’s very slow to get started and the entire second half of the novel—notwithstanding a few nice moments and twists—feels unnecessarily drawn out, especially as the ending is obvious from a mile away.

However, Charlotte’s worst is still pretty good. The story is exciting and relatively fast-paced, apart from several noticeably slow sections of characters pining over one another and wasting away because they’re so badly in love (again: “unromantic”?). Shirley herself is an unexpected and feisty woman whose verbal sparring is a delight to listen to, and the friendship between her and Caroline (the likeable but sometimes dull heroine) is the best relationship in the novel. The themes of marriage, purpose, and feminism are interesting and cleverly explored. And, as always, Charlotte’s prose is so comfortable and easy to read while being beautiful, though sometimes it goes a little overboard:

At that time, at eighteen, drawing near the confines of illusive, void dreams, Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front. These shores are yet distant; they look so blue, soft, gentle, we long to reach them. In sunshine we see a greenness beneath the azure, as of spring meadows; we catch glimpses of silver lines, and imagine the roll of living waters. Could we but reach this land, we think to hunger and thirst no more; whereas many a wilderness, and often the flood of death, or some stream of sorrow as cold and almost as black as death, is to be crossed ere true bliss can be tasted. Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it is secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes. The heart's blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.

Overall, this was an enjoyable story with plenty of wit and charm, but a bit too straightforward—and long—to be truly brilliant. Beautiful prose aside, it hardly even feels like a Brontë novel.

Some favorite passages:

I have settled it decidedly that marriage and love are superfluities, intended only for the rich, who live at ease, and have no need to take thought for the morrow; or desperations, the last and reckless joy of the deeply wretched, who never hope to rise out of the slough of their utter poverty.’

‘I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health: half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?’

Probably I shall be an old maid. I shall live to see Robert married to some one else, some rich lady: I shall never marry. What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my place in the world?’

‘Difference of age and difference of temperament occasion difference of sentiment,’ was the reply. ‘It can scarcely be expected that the eager and young should hold the opinions of the cool and middle-aged.’

They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood; and when I see such people as that stately Anglo-Belgian – that Gérard Moore before me, gravely talking to me of business, really I feel quite gentlemanlike.

for Miss Helstone was slow to make fresh acquaintance. She was always held back by the idea that people could not want her, – that she could not amuse them;

‘We were going simply to see the old trees, the old ruins; to pass a day in old times, surrounded by olden silence, and above all by quietude.’

Indisputably, a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.’ ‘Above us?’ ‘I would scorn to contend for empire with him, – I would scorn it. Shall my left hand dispute for precedence with my right? – shall my heart quarrel with my pulse? – shall my veins be jealous of the blood which fills them?’ ‘Men and women, husbands and wives quarrel horribly, Shirley.’ ‘Poor things! – poor, fallen, degenerate things! God made them for another lot – for other feelings.’ ‘But are we men’s equals, or are we not?’ ‘Nothing ever charms me more than when I meet my superior – one who makes me sincerely feel that he is my superior.’ ‘Did you ever meet him?’ ‘I should be glad to see him any day: the higher above me, so much the better: it degrades to stoop – it is glorious to look up. What frets me is, that when I try to esteem, I am baffled: when religiously inclined, there are but false gods to adore. I disdain to be a Pagan.’

It was my doing, and one of those silly deeds it distresses the heart and sets the face on fire to think of: one of those small but sharp recollections that return, lacerating your self-respect like tiny penknives, and forcing from your lips, as you sit alone, sudden, insane-sounding interjections.’

Caroline took her hand when she was dressed, hurried her down-stairs, out of doors, and thus they sped through the fields, laughing as they went, and looking very much like a snow-white dove and gem-tinted bird-of-paradise joined in social flight.

‘I’ll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me.

‘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.

But when we are young,’ added the girl of eighteen, ‘our minds are careless and our lives easy.’

But you know, Mrs Pryor, it is scarcely living to measure time as I do at the Rectory. The hours pass, and I get them over somehow, but I do not live. I endure existence, but I rarely enjoy it.

I ought never to have married: mine is not the nature easily to find a duplicate, or likely to assimilate with a contrast. I was quite aware of my own ineligibility;

Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures.

But indolent she is, reckless she is, and most ignorant, for she does not know her dreams are rare – her feelings peculiar: she does not know, has never known, and will die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.

God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die.

She wears armour under her silk dress that you cannot penetrate.’

But, Jessie, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky; but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest: it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church-tower: it rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard: the nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago: a howling, rainy autumn evening too – when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery, sat near a wood-fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling; and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them; Life and Friendship yet blessed them; but Jessie lay cold, coffined, solitary – only the sod screening her from the storm.

She smiled. She pursued her embroidery carefully and quickly; but her eyelash twinkled, and then it glittered, and then a drop fell.

‘You do know, but you won’t speak: all must be locked up in yourself.’ ‘Because it is not worth sharing.’ ‘Because nobody can give the high price you require for your confidence.

Decidedly not: it was strange; it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.

What are your intentions, Miss Keeldar?’ ‘In what respect?’ ‘In respect of matrimony.’ ‘To be quiet – and to do just as I please.’

‘Suitability of age.’ – We were born in the same year; consequently, he is still a boy, while I am a woman: ten years his senior to all intents and purposes.

Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or else we part.”

The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest!