Shirley

Charlotte Bronte was a natural story-teller with a gift for creating memorable characters and for evoking athmosphere. The novel is set among the cloth mills of the author’s native Yorkshire and she succeeds brilliantly in creating the full drama of the latter part of the Napoleonic Wars when labour-saving machinery was smashed by desperate, unemployed workers. Rich is historical detail, Shirley is a human as well as a social novel with a perpetual relevance in its exploration of humanity’s efforts to reconcile personal and economic aspirations with social justice and harmony.