Shirley (The World's Classics)
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0192815628 / Publisher: Oxford University Press, September 1983
A spirited heiress marries the brother of a Yorkshire mill owner who produces laborsaving devices that cause unemployment and workmen's riots during the early 1800s
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Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Bronte vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning." Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.
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