Shirley (Annotated)

Set amid the industrial unrest of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic Wars, Shirley is Charlotte Brontë's most overtly social novel, intertwining the Luddite disturbances, economic hardship, and questions of women's independence with a complex double-heroine plot. Its prose combines vigorous realism, Gothic intensity, satire, and moral reflection, expanding the domestic novel into a study of class con...