Shirley

Shirley is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë, published in 1849 under the pseudonym Currer Bell. It was her second novel after Jane Eyre.

The book is set in Yorkshire during the Napoleonic wars, when the Orders in Council had closed European markets and the textile trade was ruined, and the first part of it concerns a mill owner whose new machinery is being smashed by the men it has put out of work. Shirley Keeldar is the heiress who gives the novel its name and has her own views about what she can do with her fortune; Caroline Helstone is her friend, whose life has been narrower and who spends much of the book waiting on decisions made by other people. Brontë based part of the story on the Luddite disturbances in the West Riding and on the people she had known, and the novel is unusual for its period in putting the working conditions and the position of women into the same plot.

The book was published the year after her first novel and the same year she lost her brother and two of her sisters, and it is the most directly political of her four novels.