SHIRLEY

This 1859 novel, set during the Luddite riots, is centered on the character of Robert Moore, a mill-owner who, despite the outrage of his workers, introduces new machinery at his mill--an act that ends in violence. In an effort to recoup his losses,Moore courts Shirley Keeldar, an heiress, despite his love for his cousin Caroline, who is poor but who returns his feeling. Shirley, however, is not to be bought; she secretly loves Moore's impoverished brother, Louis, the family tutor. SHIRLEY is Charlotte Brontë's only overt work of social criticism, a protest against both the insensitivity of the mill-owners and the subservient position of women in the mid-1800's. The novel is more in the tradition of Brontë's friend Elizabeth Gaskell, whose fiction was frequently set against the background of the Industrial Revolution and its effects on rural workers.