In the Library
Shirley
Charlotte Brontë, 1849
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 214k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Men, I believe, fancy women's minds something like those of children. Now, that is a mistake.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
The same author asking the same question about a woman's place, but in the first person and at close range, where the anger has nowhere to hide.
£1.99
Germinal
Émile Zola
Zola goes down the pit with the same hungry workers Brontë watched from the mill yard, and lets their strike end in sabotage, flood and soldiers' bullets.
£1.99
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot's Dorothea is the woman Shirley keeps imagining, clever and ardent and given nothing to do, set in a Midlands town arguing over reform and the coming railway.
£1.99
About the book
Cold lentils and vinegar without oil: that is what the first page offers you, and it means it. Charlotte Brontë set out to write something real and unromantic as Monday morning, and then the book broke open under her. Branwell died, then Emily, then Anne, inside nine months, and you can feel the manuscript stop and start around the graves. What survived is a Yorkshire valley in 1812 with soldiers on the road and wagon-loads of new frames and shears coming up from Stilbro' for men to smash, and inside a rectory a girl with nothing whatever to do, asking what she was created for and where her place in the world is. Beside her stands an heiress who owns the land, keeps a great dog, calls herself Captain Keeldar, and says aloud that men write women wrong. Shirley was a man's name until this book. Every Shirley since has been named after her.