Shirley and Caroline
The first chapter of Shirley is enough to deter many a reader from advancing a step further than the threshold. It required all the remembered fascinations of Jane Eyre to keep down the feelings of dissatisfaction.… Shirley is better written than Jane Eyre, but there is less power in it.
—Unsigned review, Atlas, 18491
Shirley, first and foremost, is a story of female friendship. It is also about class distinctions, the Napoleonic War, Yorkshire politics, gender roles, the behavior of the clergy, the power of a female heiress, and “the condition of women question,” i.e., should women earn a living and support themselves. It is some hybrid of Charles Dickens’s thoroughness, Jane Austen’s worldview, and Charlotte’s own unique blend of Romanticism and candor. Shirley is the first Brontë novel to have a narrator who is not part of the action; the first time we hear the voice of someone who is neither composing a letter or scribbling in a diary nor making a private confession, but instead observing the local goings-on alongside us. Charlotte also stops to pivot downstage and give us her thoughts on youth, working-class morals, feminism, and whatever else comes to mind. It is surprising and odd and I love it.
Charlotte begins Shirley with four curates tediously bickering over theology at the dinner table. No joke, I tried to read Shirley four times before I got past the curates. One review compared the novel’s opening to the monsters people put at their gates, or “ugly dogs to deter idle folk from entering.”2 My latest theory is that the curates are Charlotte’s response to the male critics who seemed to want her books to be more like men’s books. So she begins a book entirely about the interior lives of women with a bunch of tedious local clergymen, as if to say Here, dudes, here are your men.
Eventually, if we are stalwart and true, we meet the heroine, Caroline Helstone, a typical lighthearted romantic heroine. It’s possible that Caroline is loosely, loosely based on Charlotte’s best friend Ellen Nussey. She’s a mild, well-behaved curate’s niece, politely in love with her neighbor and distant cousin Robert Gerard Moore. She studies French and sewing with his sister, Hortense, and lives for the evenings when Robert joins them in the parlor to read aloud or chat. This mellow domestic sphere is disrupted when textile embargoes from Parliament force Robert to lay off his workers; Caroline’s uncle forbids her to see Robert on the grounds that he’s a presumed Flemish sympathizer. It’s historically interesting (… ish) and lays the foundation for a conventional marriage plot with various temporary obstacles that will resolve as expected after the right people make the correct courtly gestures of affection and contrition at the appropriate times.
Caroline Helstone certainly thinks that’s the kind of novel she’s in—after an evening with Robert Moore during which he demonstrates basic human courtesy, she is luminous with hope and expectation. “When people love, the next step is they marry,” she sighs, dopily.3 I’m not saying Caroline was desperate, but she certainly went quickly from having no indication that Robert loved her to being sure they were about to become engaged. This is where my suspicions that Charlotte was mocking me began to develop. The next morning, all of Robert’s lover-like manners from the night before are totally gone; Caroline is distraught. Charlotte The Narrator addresses the lovelorn flatly:
Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions, utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.4
Yikes. I’m of several minds about the sudden onset of metaphoric martyrdom. Part of me thinks Charlotte is making fun of me for picking out nursery supplies before a second date and whining when it doesn’t pan out. The other part of me is convinced that Charlotte crafts this restrictive, patriarchal world with all its ladylike confines and socially appropriate withholding of feelings so that Shirley Keeldar can kick the door open and let the sunshine in. A few pages later, Caroline’s literally in the middle of conducting Old Maid research (Is it better to be the cheerful, saintly, helpful old maid everyone asks for favors, or the cranky, acerbic old maid people are afraid of?*) when her uncle drags her up to the local squire’s estate, Fieldhead, to meet the new tenant. This is when we get to stop caring about all that thorough historical back-storying. In fact, the novel’s entire historical foundation is about to stop being remotely compelling (even to Charlotte, who abandons the Luddite Rebellion plotline for chapters at a time—leaving me gasping, What about the weaving machines?!?!?).
The arrival of Shirley signals the end of this novel’s resemblance to anything traditional. Twenty-one years old and the only child of parents who gave her the traditionally masculine name they would have given their male heir, this reincarnation of Rosalind, fresh from the Forest of Arden, strides in to flip on all the lights and crank up the volume. It’s like we’ve been slogging through a despondent swamp and are yanked out by a claw machine.
Shirley has style, intelligence, an estate, a title, and oh best beloved Shirley, the panache to thoroughly enjoy all of it. Caroline is all naïveté and quiet resignation and faith in romance. Shirley is boisterous, funny, and confident, though not quite as self-assured as she initially seems. Charlotte wrote Shirley, she confessed to Elizabeth Gaskell later, as an homage to her sister Emily, had she been born “into health and prosperity.”5 Though there are other spitfires, other opinionated damsels, other protagonists with swagger, Shirley is unique among her contemporaries by also being thoroughly lovable, in ways your Becky Sharps or Emma Woodhouses are just not.
I was bowled over by Shirley’s wit and charm; in Caroline and Shirley, I saw myself and Preeti. We were a matched set. The two of them, and the two of us, never ran out of things to say, and weren’t afraid to tackle the big questions, like whether men and women are actually different or just socialized differently, or what exactly the producers hoped to improve on by remaking The Parent Trap. Our version of Shirley and Caroline’s picnics was a constant Gchat conversation in which we debated the work of L. M. Montgomery, the upcoming season of Mad Men, the merits of various animals, kids, and vegetables. We could talk about the Bechdel test for hours, all day, every day, for weeks. After a million “oh my God you have to read _____” conversations, we formed a book club where we’d each read a new book and trade a YA book from our childhoods, which is how I discovered Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman Cycle novels and how Preeti met Margaret Thursday. I’d never cast myself as the quieter, inexperienced one before, but then I’d never been out with someone as warm and funny as Preeti, either.
Suddenly every bad date I’d ever suffered through with a bore or a jerk seemed like the price of admission I’d had to pay to have this, a girl I wanted to be my girlfriend, who was beautiful and funny and didn’t want me to change or be less vocal, who liked lots of things I liked and knew many things I didn’t know. I gazed into the future and wondered which of us would get pregnant when it was time to start a family, or if we both would. We each had a brother, so the genetics wouldn’t be a problem; I guessed it would depend on how our careers were going. This was after knowing her for eight days.
For our second date, I took Preeti to dinner at my favorite crepe place, and afterward we wandered the East Village; it was just as much fun as the first outing had been, though we again only parted with a friendly hug. I was confused, but figured I just needed to be more overt about the fact that I was attracted to her. On our third date, I upped my casual-arm-around-the-shoulders quota of the evening to four, and made sure we brushed hands every hour or so. Poor Preeti—she had to resort to dramatic gestures to let me know it wasn’t going to happen. When we picked our seats in the empty movie theater, she sat down a seat away from me, plunked her bag down beside her, and took out her knitting.
I was crushed. I nursed my hurt feelings all through the (terrible) movie and said goodbye abruptly afterward. The next day when her name flashed up in a Gchat window, I didn’t hurry to click to it. When I finally did, she was apologizing for not knowing how to say sooner that she only liked me platonically, but that she liked me a lot. What could I do? I’m sure I said something nonchalant and hid behind jokes about what a terrible couple we would have made, like she was the clueless one for thinking I thought it would work. I was grieving and simultaneously trying to act as if it hadn’t occurred to me there was even anything to grieve over. I figured if I could stick around, eventually she might succumb to what I hoped was charm, and not just dogged neediness. Nothing in our dynamic actually changed—we still chatted all day and cooked together, sat knee to knee on the couch, and planned road trips during movie marathons. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought we still were dating, just not particularly demonstrative. Meanwhile my heart was grumbling rebelliously from inside its carbonite prison.
What I most appreciated about Shirley (besides the Sapphic undertones and how glad Shirley and Caroline are to exclude men from their picnics) was Charlotte’s sense of humor, delivered in sly asides to the reader and in the sillier plot devices. Mistaken identity and long-lost relatives have rarely been played so straight-facedly. This was also the first time I’d seen adult female friendship portrayed in any Brontë novel—Jane Eyre, Cathy Earnshaw, and Agnes Grey all have to make their own ways in the world, but Caroline and Shirley have one another to lean on. They get to socialize without chaperones or romantic prospects. They’re not rivals or competitors (though a sketchy sort of love triangle does form around them, thanks to the inevitable intrusion of men); they’re just friends, who read poetry and plan trips and sometimes sit quietly outdoors together, probably with one’s head in the other’s lap or casually holding hands or whatever. I’m not picky.
I think part of why I took Preeti’s rejection so hard was that I find female friendship challenging generally. Not that I don’t crave it, but that I don’t often have the emotional currency to sustain it. Charlotte Brontë excelled at female friendship. She may have compartmentalized her friendships, or maintained them primarily through letter-writing, but they were profound nonetheless.
Charlotte’s best friends included Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor (who later moved to New Zealand), their teacher Miss Wooler, and eventually the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Though Charlotte initially attempted to indoctrinate Ellen into the Brontë literary lifestyle by inundating her with reading lists while they were at school together, she eventually gave up and found plenty to discuss with “almost the only, and certainly the dearest,” friend she had outside her family circle.6
Her correspondence with Ellen is full of local nothings: how the journey was, whether the new cuffs were becoming, their health, the weather, traveling logistics. It’s delightful to see her mind at play, but it also becomes strange as her homebody epistolary life began to coexist with her extraordinary literary one. Charlotte and Anne had made a pact with Emily that nobody should know the true identities of the Bells. However, Ellen was suspicious, having seen Charlotte correcting proofs of Jane Eyre. By mid-1848, she was even bold enough to ask Charlotte about her work in progress, which Charlotte pretended not to understand, replying, “Your naivety in gravely inquiring my opinion of the ‘last new novel’ amuses me: we do not subscribe to a circulating library at Haworth and consequently ‘new novels’ rarely indeed come in our way.”7 (In addition to the novel she was in the middle of writing, Charlotte was at that point regularly receiving whole boxes of books and periodicals from Smith, Elder & Co.) Resolute, Charlotte kept their secret from Ellen until Emily’s death in December of that year.
Charlotte was one of the greatest literary artists in history, yet you would never know from most of her letters to school friends that she had ever even thought of writing—much less been writing constantly since childhood. In one letter Charlotte lectures her publisher on the best way to spend the funds the Brontës had set aside for publicity and printing costs; in another, written the same day, she thanks Ellen graciously for sending a bonnet, and updates her on the welfare of family servants and pets. She drops literary luminary Elizabeth Gaskell a line to commiserate about a critic who’d reviewed them both, and in her next note, nags Ellen about which train she’ll be arriving on and complains of boredom.
Though Shirley was based on Emily Brontë, and Caroline (very loosely!) on Ellen, their friendship was likely derived from Charlotte and her friend Mary Taylor (whose family also served as inspiration for Caroline’s neighbors, the Yorkes). Charlotte and Mary talked about politics, women’s rights, and more intellectual subjects—including her books. Mary is funny and sharp, less fastidious-seeming than her contemporaries. After leaving Brussels, she worked as a tutor in Germany, then packed up and moved to New Zealand, where she opened a store, built herself a house, and stayed for nearly fifteen years. Her letters are distinguished both by their energetic nature and by the fact that she knew about Charlotte’s publishing efforts much earlier than anyone else. After receiving a copy of Jane Eyre, she wrote,
It seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book. Such events did not happen while I was in England. I begin to believe in your existence much as I do in Mr. Rochester’s. In a believing mood I don’t doubt either of them.…
I will scold you well when I see you.…
I have lately met with a wonder of a man who thinks Jane Eyre would have done better marry Mr. Rivers! He gives no reasons—such people never do.8
Charlotte cheekily mentioned this letter to Margaret Wooler in August, saying, “I heard from Mary Taylor in June.… She expressed pity for my comparatively dull, uneventful, and unoccupied existence.”9 When Mary finally read Shirley, she wrote to Charlotte,
What a little lump of perfection you’ve made me! There is a strange feeling in reading it of hearing us all talking. Shirley is much more interesting than J. Eyre—who indeed never interests you at all until she has something to suffer. All through this last novel there is so much more life & stir that it leaves you far more to remember than the other.10
But here is why I’m really obsessed by Charlotte’s friendships with Ellen, Mary Taylor, Miss Wooler, Laetitia Wheelwright, and her other intimate correspondents: these relationships, which she established as a young girl, sustained her for nearly thirty years.
In my own thirty years, I have retained maybe one friend from each stage of my life—middle school, high school, college—and that’s it. Handfuls of acquaintances, with names and faces I recognize and would be happy to see again if I ran into them on the train, but the kinds of friends you keep informed of your daily activities? I could list them on an index card. I could tear the index card in half and share it with the hermit who lives in the Inwood Hill Park caves and gets his mail at Dunkin’ Donuts. I socialize with neighbors at the dog park and am friendly with my coworkers, but I rarely join them for parties or meet up after hours. I don’t seem to keep up with many people. Sometimes it just doesn’t occur to me. Other times I’m deliberately cocooned inside my work or my own head and everyone else fades to the background. But then I feel sad, because when I resurface, I realize nobody tried to keep in touch with me either.
There are times when I totally understand Charlotte’s feelings of being stuck, facing either isolation in a country home that she loved or the fatiguing overstimulation of the city’s literary scene. And I understand her sense of inadequacy when her friends sent her boxes of books and magazines. She always wrote W. S. Williams and George Smith to say thank you and share her opinions of the contents, but she felt she had nothing to give them in return—not even an engaging account of rural life. What was a lecture at the Mechanics Institute going to offer the cosmopolitan literary gentlemen? What commentary could someone marooned in a tiny village offer on politics or current events?
My best friend, Sally, and I met in high school; she sends cards and care packages for every holiday you could possibly imagine, from St. Patrick’s Day to Labor Day. Last time I saw her, I planned to make up for the unanswered pile of cards by treating her to dinner. Over dessert, she presented me with a bag of goodies and a card. Evidently it was Friendship Day. Sally and I often celebrate how easily we pick up where we left off when we finally do manage a visit or a late night of ice cream and TV bingeing, but it’s bittersweet.
In college, I was part of a trio of best friends who thrived when we lived in the same building. But we barely even survived a semester of sharing an apartment—too much togetherness, rapid life changes, and mismatched habits sent us off the rails just after the winter break. After graduation, it took two years of living in the same city before I ran into one of them on the street and had the presence of mind to apologize for having been so passive-aggressive and distant.* She was gracious enough to forgive me, and we reestablished a warm, if occasional, friendship. She invited me to her wedding a few years later, and I was touched and happy to see her. But I noticed something else—she was surrounded by her bandmates and her family, friends from adulthood and childhood and everywhere in between. People loved her, and wanted to share her joy. When I thought about my future hypothetical wedding, I felt hard-pressed to name more than a handful of people I wanted there. Do I lack empathy? Is it that I just don’t like many people? Am I too irascible? I feel deficient and wrong, but there it is.
The intimacy issues I’d never faced in a romantic relationship (because I was never honest or open enough to confront them) are all over the place in my platonic friendships. When you have no ability to navigate confrontation, you never work through the bumps and scrapes of daily close-knit acquaintance, so friendship is either superficial or drifts away over time. I did find a group of female friends in grad school, thanks to the closeness of workshops and the rigors of working in the department office. I hadn’t experienced that kind of intimacy since high school theater productions. We stayed up late for program events, decorated for the winter ball like the prom committee I was never on, and I almost forgot to feel like an outsider. But then, after a year of being entertained and supported on a daily basis by these insightful, hilarious women, I let our once-daily text messages lapse into silence. I never vented my irritation over canceled brunch plans or being on our phones at dinner. I found myself becoming standoffish. Now I can see it as a defense mechanism; I didn’t want to work through what was bothering me because that would mean voicing what was bothering me, which might mean they would reject me before I even had a chance to ghost out of their lives forever. Around the time we were all confronting the end of grad school and the beginning of the unknown, instead of huddling with them to face our uncertainties together, I was dismissive and brusque. I wanted no part of their fears about what was coming next, because then I would have to confront the terrifying fact that I had no idea what was coming next. Instead of commiserating, I belittled their uncertainty and kept them at arm’s length. When my warmest, most openhearted friend moved out of state to start her next chapter, which she’d decided to do without telling me, I found that I was left behind. I miss her and her nurturing friendship every day.
Someday, I’d like to have the kind of friend—or be the kind of friend—who stays in touch regularly without finding it a burden. I am sometimes very afraid I will never be able to develop or maintain these kinds of bonds; that I am too gruff or judgmental or detached or arrogant. I’m often disinterested in the minutiae of people’s lives, and I mask my feelings with humor when I should be sincere. Maybe I just lack the constancy to have the friendships I see other women having all around me in life and in literature. I love to see fictional characters be vulnerable—it’s almost the fastest way to my heart—but I’m rarely able to achieve it myself. Maybe I don’t deserve a Shirley. It’s natural to grow apart from people, or to need new friends who meet us where we are, but I don’t want to be incapable of putting down roots or letting my guard down. Were she able to read these words, Charlotte might say something like what she once wrote to W. S. Williams:
We all—except the arrogant and self-confident—despise ourselves very thoroughly sometimes; objects of our own withering scorn, we have every one been on occasion.…
A bad account—yet I believe there is hardly a human being breathes but might say as much.11
While Shirley seems to showcase that rare wide-open friendship that endures, despite conflict, disagreement, and romantic rivalry, Charlotte’s epistolary friendships also help me see that close acquaintances can be maintained in small doses. And it bears remembering that she wrote Shirley as an homage to a beloved sister—there’s no way to compete with those lifelong bonds. My mother is one of four sisters, and has always had the knack of making and keeping female friends. It’s one of the many social skills she possesses that I envy, along with making small talk without screaming inside.
But back to Shirley. The second volume opens with a chapter titled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” and an ominous proclamation: “The future sometimes seems to sob a low warning of the events it is bringing us.”12 Afterward, the cheery sunlit novel falters and dims; Caroline falls ill, Robert Moore is injured by the local rabble after a labor dispute boils over, and Shirley must suffer the arrival of unpleasant relatives. The halcyon days of social teas and local festivals and mocking idiotic curates are no more. Why the sudden shift?
Charlotte wrote Shirley between 1848 and 1849. When she began, she was flush with critical praise for Jane Eyre, and the generally positive reception to her sisters’ work. But then, on the 24th of September, 1848, having suffered from advanced alcoholism and opium addiction since the Robinsons dismissed him, Branwell died in agony and despair. At his funeral, Emily caught a cold that weakened her never-strong constitution. Exasperating Charlotte and agonizing Patrick, she refused any medical treatment even as she worsened. Charlotte asked George Smith and W. S. Williams for advice, and even wrote a letter detailing Emily’s case to a London doctor on their recommendation. But Emily wouldn’t try the medicine he sent, or even describe her symptoms to her anxious sisters. On December 19, she died too. Her faithful dog, Keeper, followed the coffin to the church.
And though Charlotte imagined the worst was past, Anne soon began showing symptoms of the same consumptive illness. The water and the climate of Yorkshire was persistently inhospitable to the delicate Brontës—Patrick had been lobbying for years to get government officials to test the water quality, based on the infant and adult mortality rate of the village. Amid all of this loss and grief, Charlotte found herself quite unable to write. Her letters are short and full of symptoms and hope and dread, and she wrote far fewer of them than normal. When it looked like there might be hope for Anne’s recovery, Charlotte sent the first volume of Shirley to Smith and Elder for them to review. Anne convinced Charlotte and Ellen Nussey to accompany her to Scarborough, on the advice of physicians who thought sea air was beneficial for consumptives. In April of 1849, in the last letter Anne posted before they set off on their journey, she wrote to Ellen,
I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect.… But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.13
We haven’t talked about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall yet, but I should assure you now that her life was definitely not lacking in purpose—or at least not in achievement. Anne died in Charlotte’s arms on May 25, 1849, and was buried in Scarborough. According to Charlotte, with her last words Anne urged Ellen to be a sister to Charlotte in her place, and assured them both that she was glad death had come so gently.
From September to the following May, Charlotte lost her entire family, except for her father. How was Charlotte to finish her wry, historical Yorkshire romp after such a year? How was Charlotte to take another breath or sit upright for more than a few moments at a time?! She stayed in Scarborough with Ellen for another week after Anne’s death, then returned home to Haworth, where she was greeted by her father, the family servants, and Anne’s and Emily’s dogs. The dogs, she said, looked at her like her sisters must be following close behind.14 Once she was back in the dining room that used to be full of her sisters’ conversation, listening to the silence that had replaced it, she came to a realization. She wrote to W. S. Williams in June,
Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted Sorrow—The society of a calm, serenely cheerful companion—such as Ellen—soothes pain like a soft opiate—but I find it does not probe or heal the wound—sharper more severe means are necessary to make a remedy. Total change might do much—where that cannot be obtained—work is the best substitute.15
Charlotte was never able to distance herself from the intensity of sorrow that interrupted the book’s writing in order to revise the whole. It explains the jumping narrative, the tug-of-war between the political and personal, the abrupt transitions from serious philosophical rumination to goofy Restoration comedy shenanigans, the breaking of the fourth wall. After the dramatic opening of the second volume, Caroline contracts one of those literary illnesses that wastes one away, attributable to grief over her mistaken belief that Shirley is to marry her beloved Robert Moore. Caroline observes, “I believe grief is, and always has been, my worst ailment. I sometimes think if an abundant gush of happiness came on me I could revive yet,” which prompts Shirley’s governess, Mrs. Pryor, to reveal theatrically that she is Caroline’s long-lost mother, Agnes Pryor, née Grey (Charlotte’s quiet nod to Anne).16 Agnes had been a governess before she married Caroline’s father and then left him when he turned out to be cruel and abusive. In an era of impossible divorce law and prevalent social stigma, she actually left, even though it meant the whole village would think she was an unfit mother and Caroline would be raised by a stern uncle.
I like to imagine Charlotte was rewriting the story of losing her own mother with this plot twist. How wonderful would it have been for a caretaker to suddenly materialize from the next manor house over, someone who could have nursed Branwell, Emily, and Anne back to health, or helped Charlotte and Patrick bear the sadness of suddenly finding themselves alone in the Parsonage. Of course Charlotte wrote a mater ex machina—she was sorely in need of one herself. The least she could do was give one to Caroline. There are very few mothers and daughters in the Brontës’ books—besides Agnes and her mother, Caroline is the only female character who even gets a mother she can talk to; Cathy Earnshaw and Isabella Linton don’t live long enough to get to know their own children.
The dose of happiness Caroline receives after being reunited with her mother is the beginning of her recovery. Soon she is well enough to resume her visits to Fieldhead, cheering up Shirley, who has become rather tired of the uncle, aunt, and cousins who have been visiting her (along with Robert Moore’s brother, Louis, tutor to Shirley’s cousin Henry). Next Shirley’s focus shifts from Shirley to Louis, the tutor. This annoys me, because there are no more picnics, no more feminist debates, and very little actually happens. He mostly skulks around the schoolroom waiting for Shirley to come back from parties. But maybe it was unthinkable for Charlotte to keep writing a character in her sister’s strong, opinionated voice once that voice had been silenced.
I never thought anything would make me miss Heathcliff, but aloof, forbearing, never-laughing, seldom-smiling Louis makes me a little nostalgic for a man who at least knows how to plan a party. Why is Louis in this book, you may find yourself asking, since he is pretty clearly terrible? One afternoon, Shirley’s cousin Henry, a conveniently placed Tiny-Tim-alike, is going through Louis’s desk and finds a parcel of copybooks. Caroline opens one and discovers not only was Louis originally Shirley’s teacher, too, but they’d been secretly in love for years. Gasp!
After letting Louis blather on in his diary far too long, Charlotte disposes of the curates and marries off Caroline and Robert. Shirley refuses to do any of her own wedding planning in order to force Louis to take up the reins of familial leadership (which frees her up to run her actual estate), and the book ends right as the power dynamics get interesting again. You’ll be relieved, I’m sure, to learn that the Orders of Council are repealed, and the end of the Napoleonic War restores the wool market’s stability within the community. Charlotte leaves Shirley by flashing forward to the narrator sitting at a kitchen table listening to her housekeeper retell the story of two local married couples, who married for love and companionship, and lived happily ever after. Conspiracy theorists may well wonder if this housekeeper is not also Nelly Dean, compelled to serve as perpetual neighborhood historian through some Faustian bargain.
The messages of Shirley are so much more complicated than what I get from most of the other Brontë novels. They reflect Charlotte’s own evolving attitude toward marriage and attachment, no doubt; otherwise the characters would either marry or refuse to marry, and move on. Instead she expostulates at length about men and women and who must be dominant and why and whether they are truly equal and whether that’s how it should be or merely how it is. In Shirley we are presented with nearly every option open to village-born women. We meet wives, old maids, chatty girls, withdrawn girls, girls who married well, girls who married poorly, servants, governesses, women who keep house for their bachelor relatives, a beautiful girl with a substantial dowry, and Caroline, a pretty girl just well-born enough to have few respectable employment options. The richest protagonist in the entire Brontë canon gets to manage her estate’s affairs, not just passively wait to be married off while a male heir profits from the entailment. We get snapshots of unhappy families and happy families, marriages with children and marriages with no children, and are mostly left to sift through the data to draw our own conclusions.
In Shirley, Charlotte also contemplates whether women should work, disappointing Mary Taylor (who was rather radical on the subject for the time). Of course women must work, Mary thought. The real controversy was how difficult it was to find any means of self-sufficiency at all. As she grumbled to Ellen Nussey in 1849, “there are no means for a woman to live in England but by teaching, sewing or washing. The last is the best. The best paid is the least unhealthy & the most free. But it is not paid well enough to live by. Moreover it is impossible for any one not born to this position to take it up afterward. I don’t know why but it is.”17 Later Mary would vent her frustrations in published work of her own, advocating financial responsibility and independence for women of every station and circumstance.
Unsurprisingly, Shirley’s emphasis on women’s options confirmed the suspicions of contemporary critics who already thought Currer Bell was a woman. Charlotte was chagrined—“I was sadly put out by the Daily News.… Why can they not be content to take Currer Bell for a man? I imagined, mistakenly, it now appears, that Shirley bore fewer traces of a female hand than Jane Eyre; that I have misjudged disappoints me a little, though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.”18 Oh Charlotte. Maybe it was something about the way the heroine goes around her village calling all the men stupid that gave you away.
The Mary Taylor philosophy, that women must be equipped to earn their own living, dovetails neatly with the values my mother instilled in me growing up. She comes from a line of women who had to shift for themselves after husbands and fathers died or left. She often reminded me, with some bitterness, that it would be up to me to provide for myself and my future children. My father, who recently retired from the US Securities and Exchange Commission after twenty-five years, usually finds it advisable to sit quietly when Mom’s conversation takes on this theme. He had stuck around, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been prepared.
And as for Shirley, for all she talks of wanting to submit to a masterful man, what she really likes is Louis undertaking to make her submit; whether she ever actually surrenders is debatable. It’s all very Taming of the Shrew. She doesn’t even let Louis have the last word when he asks her to marry him. After Louis proposes (or at least lectures himself to a standstill), Shirley counters with,
Mr. Moore… I do not ask you to take off my shoulders all the cares and duties of property, but I ask you to share the burden, and to show me how to sustain my part well. Your judgment is well balanced, your heart is kind, your principles are sound. I know you are wise; I feel you are benevolent; I believe you are conscientious. Be my companion through life; be my guide where I am ignorant; be my master where I am faulty; be my friend always!19
I like the collaborative but pragmatic note that Shirley strikes here—she’s not making a whimsical leap; she’s weighed the pros and cons and made her choice accordingly. If she would just leave out the “be my master” part, I could imagine using this in a proposal myself. The romantic teenage Charlotte who once wrote to Ellen Nussey that only love could induce her to marry, and who gave Jane and Rochester the impetuous love of a lifetime, had by now acquired much more grown-up ideas about why two people might decide to enter into matrimony.
CHARLOTTE finished Shirley by September, and it was published in October. The critics didn’t know what to make of it, really; it had elements of literature they recognized, but it was neither romance nor history, neither social critique nor a morality tale. It has Charlotte’s signature dry humor, her luscious Romantic description, her keen observation of human foibles and pomposity, and, best of all, women searching for their places in the world. But all that most critics could see were the signs of Currer Bell’s presumed femininity “clouding up his judgment.” Their loss.
I read Shirley at a time when I needed the galvanizing energy of platonic female friendship in my life; I needed confidence in my own purpose, and an appreciation for non-romantic companionship. It might be a mess tonally, but Shirley has some of the funniest scenes Charlotte ever wrote, like when an idiotic curate comes to tea at Shirley’s home and gets chased upstairs by the dog and locks himself into a guest room while another idiotic curate pounds on the door; it’s practically a Victorian Bugs Bunny cartoon. Then there’s the delightful hidden treasure of Mary Taylor’s family as the Yorkes—the resemblance was so true to life that Mary observed dryly in a letter that Charlotte had put Robert Moore in the wrong back bedroom after he was wounded.
In many ways, Shirley has a lot more to say than Jane Eyre, though it does lack the power and electricity of its predecessor. Caroline has to confront her romantic notions and reconcile them with the real world while still protecting her poetry-loving heart. Mrs. Pryor sets an example of hard-won independence. Shirley gets to be confrontational and flamboyant and whistle and manage her estate and pick out a husband and go to the village fair. Role models all around.
Preeti and I maintained our high-intensity friendship for a few months, but then one afternoon, she told me she’d never thought we were “dating.” Ever. I knew she’d decided she wasn’t interested in a relationship after our first few dates, but I thought we had at least been on the same page up until then. I thought those had at least been dates. Puzzlingly platonic dates, yet still dates. But no. It had all been in my head. I was hurt more deeply by the idea that she’d never considered dating me than I had been by the fact that she didn’t want to continue dating me. I signed off abruptly and later sent her a terse email: “I’m sorry, I just can’t do the Preeti and Miranda show right now.”
We would briefly reconnect a few months later, when it would turn out she almost was ready to date, but by then I’d moved on. Mostly. I think Shirley helped—Caroline’s pathetic moping, Shirley’s assertiveness, even Louis’s manipulation all contributed to a list of dos and don’ts I could work with. Don’t be so waifish they can’t tell you’re interested. Don’t go out of your way to pursue someone who’s clearly pursuing someone else. Don’t put up with aloofness. Don’t put up with mercenaries. Don’t conceal your identity from your long-lost daughter. Be the kind of irascible old maid people are afraid to bother. Be generous. Be bold. Find someone who wants to be your partner in life. Let them in.
Taking Charlotte’s “labour is the cure” maxim to heart, I threw myself into my professional life instead of lingering over my romantic misfortunes. I didn’t want to work retail forever, and I couldn’t expect another professional writing opportunity out of the blue, so I had to start thinking long term. What would allow me to write, edit, and teach? Like the voice from beyond that told Jane Eyre to advertise, I heard a whisper from somewhere, graduate school.* Where would I find my living while I made that happen? I hadn’t lost touch with my old colleagues from my very first job in educational publishing. In fact, after the layoffs I’d moved to Brooklyn and into a three-bedroom apartment with Kate, the editor who’d hired me, and a rotating series of third roommates that included a drama queen, a food writer, an aspiring singer who’d recently joined one of those “maximize your life-meaning” cults, and a night owl obsessed with Sleep No More, an immersive performance piece based on Macbeth that had just begun its long run in an old hotel in Chelsea. We’d recently adopted a dog named Gracie, a comforting presence who was supposed to sleep on the couch but snuck into my room every night to keep my feet warm.
I emailed around to see if anyone was hiring. Luckily, two of my former coworkers, Eric and Sheryl, had landed together at another educational publisher, and they had an opening for a production assistant. Without saying much about it to anyone, I also applied to a graduate program that would let me write and prepare me to teach. Since I was clearly en route to becoming an old maid, at least I would be employed and in pursuit of higher education at the ripe age of twenty-six. Sometimes in life, as in literature, the best route to the thing you’re searching for is relatively uncharted.