Shirley

When Charlotte Brontë tells you that what you’re about to read is the equivalent of “cold lentils and vinegar without oil,” you should heed her warning. Exhausting, tedious, sometimes interesting - Shirley is one of those novels where, when you finally reach the conclusion, you happily shut the book and say to yourself, “I’m glad I read this, but thank goodness it’s over!”

Caroline and Shirley are the two alternating pole stars around which this novel revolves. Caroline has inner intensity and a sort of philosophical quietude and purity that renders her Madonna-esque. Shirley, when finally introduced, is as strong and fiery as any Brontë character you could wish for. She’s what modern female readers will gravitate towards – independent, immovable, and free to laugh at the pettiness of the pre-Victorian conventionalities that surround her because she has money and land and can do whatever she wants.

Interesting as Caroline and Shirley were, this novel needed an unforgiving editor to slash and cut the tiresome parts away. The prose often meandered into philosophical paths which most will not want to follow. The industrial angle is illuminating, but hardly gripping. Biblical allusions and Greek mythological references commingle, sending one into a fog of extended metaphors from which there is a very real fear that one will never again emerge. How different from the tightly woven prose of Jane Eyre, from which there is not a single sentence that could be cut that would improve the entire novel.

If you make it through Shirley, you will probably find that it was worth the struggle, but don't expect those "cold lentils and vinegar without oil" to go down without a fight.