A review by ratgirlreads
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

Having loved Jane Eyre, I had high hopes for Shirley.  Unfortunately, the book did not quite live up to them.  Partly this may simply be the genre, which is not to my taste—when I pick up a Brontë novel, I do so for the nineteenth century atmosphere and the intelligent social commentary, but at bottom they are also romance novels, and Shirley is certainly that.  With some heavyhanded editing, it might have been passable, but Charlotte seemed intent on wandering: passages such as the long chapters detailing the unpleasant habits and personalities of the young curates, without any eye towards commenting on the office or the people generally selected for it, when those characters have but a tangential relationship to the plot centering on Caroline, Shirley, and the Moores, made the novel interminable.  Her references to the established Church and the various dissenters seemed inconclusive and meandering, and thus nothing but an irritatingly extensive aside from the plot.  

Then, there is the character of Shirley herself.  Independent, intelligent, capable, she seems an ideal feminist heroine, but when she marries Louis Moore, she does so because she feels him not to be her equal but her “master,” and all of her good points then seem merely to exist to justify the long-held belief that all women just need a man to keep control of them.  

The book has its enjoyable points.  The children of the Yorke family—who play a minute role in the novel, but showse personalities and future fates Brontë insists on detailing at some length—and the effect of the adult Yorkes’ parenting style on their relationships seem interesting (and might have made a better nook than Caroline’s and Shirley’s long-drawn-out romances).  The broad historical perspective on the poor, working classes and the manufactureres during the Napoleonic wars is interesting.  But overall, the book is unnecessarily ponderous and fails to live up to the progressive ideals one hopes for from Charlotte Brontë.