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In Yorkshire in 1811 and 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars, trade is ruined and new machines are taking the jobs of the cloth workers, who rise in the Luddite…
In Yorkshire in 1811 and 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars, trade is ruined and new machines are taking the jobs of the cloth workers, who rise in the Luddite riots. Robert Moore, a determined mill owner of half-Belgian descent, brings in new machinery and faces an attack on his mill. Two very different young women love him: his quiet, sensitive cousin Caroline Helstone, who longs for useful work, and the bold, rich heiress Shirley Keeldar, who manages her own estate and speaks her mind like a man.
Context and significance
Charlotte Brontë published the novel in 1849, after Jane Eyre; she wrote it while her brother Branwell and her sisters Emily and Anne died one after another. Shirley was partly a portrait of Emily, and the book made Shirley, until then a man's name, popular for girls. Read also Villette, and see her life.
About the author
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote tiny books about them. Her two elder sisters died after a harsh boarding school, the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.
After working as a teacher and governess and studying in Brussels, she published poems with her sisters under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and in 1847 Jane Eyre made her famous. She outlived all her siblings, married in 1854 and died the following year. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights.