Brontë Charlotte - Shirley

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CHARLOTTE BRONT was born at Thornton, Yorkshire in 1816, the third child of Patrick and Maria Bront. Her father was perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire, from 1820 until his death in 1861. Her mother died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son. All of the girls except Anne were sent to a clergymens daughters boarding school (recalled as Lowood in Jane Eyre). The eldest sisters, Maria (Helen Burns) and Elizabeth, became ill there, were taken home, and died soon after at Haworth. Charlotte was employed as a teacher from 1835 to 1838, was subsequently a governess, and in 1842 went with her sister Emily to study languages in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger. Both sisters returned to Haworth when their aunt died, but Charlotte went back to the Pensionnat as a teacher in 1843. Her low spirits and her loneliness there were exacerbated by Emilys absence and by her powerful and unrequited feelings for Monsieur Heger. She returned to Haworth in the following year, and in 1846 there appeared Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Charlottes first novel, The Professor, was rejected by several publishers, and was not published until 1857. Jane Eyre was published (under the pseudonym Currer Bell) in 1847 and achieved immediate success. In 1848 Branwell Bront died, as did Emily before the end of the same year, and Anne in the following summer, so that Charlotte alone survived of the six children. Shirley was published in 1849, and Villette in 1853, both pseudonymously, although Currer Bell was identified as Charlotte Bront soon after Shirley appeared. In 1854, Charlotte married her fathers curate, the Revd A. B. Nicholls, whose passionate attachment to her won her over despite her fathers objections. She died in March 1855, a few weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, probably of complications associated with early pregnancy.

MARGARET SMITH is the editor of The Letters of Charlotte Bront (3 vols., 19952004).

HERBERT ROSENGARTEN teaches English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

JANET GEZARI is Lucy March Haskell 19 Professor of English at Connecticut College. She is the author of Charlotte Bront and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (1992) and Last Things: Emily Bronts Poems (2007).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CHARLOTTE BRONT

Edited by
HERBERT ROSENGARTEN
and
MARGARET SMITH

With an Introduction and additional Notes by
JANET GEZARI

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Text and Notes Oxford University Press 1979
Introduction, Select Bibliography Janet Gezari 2007
Chronology Sally Shuttleworth 2000

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1981
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998
New edition 2007

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bront, Charlotte, 18161855.
Shirley / Charlotte Bront; edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith; with an introduction and additional notes by Janet Gezari.New ed.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN13: 9780199297160 (acid-free paper)
ISBN10: 0199297169 (acid-free paper) 1. Textile industryFiction. 2. Yorkshire
(England)Fiction. 3. Napoleonic Wars, 18001815Fiction. 4. WomenEnglandFiction.
I. Rosengarten, Herbert. II. Smith, Margaret, 1931 III. Title.
PR4167.S52 2007
823.8dc22

2006024001

Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
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ISBN 9780199297160

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Shirley was Charlotte Bronts watershed. When she began it, she was one of four siblings; she finished it as the lone survivor. Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow, she wrote to W. S. Williams, her reader and closest adviser at Smith Elder, the firm that published her novels.

G. H. Lewess review of Shirley provoked a famous outburst: I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends! A week later, she wrote to Lewes again to explain why his review had so injured her:

not because its criticism was keen or its blame sometimes severe; not because its praise was stinted (for indeed I think you give me quite as much praise as I deserve) but because, after I had said earnestly that I wished critics would judge me as an author not as a woman, you so roughlyI even thoughtso cruelly handled the question of sex.

What had Lewes done? Just invoked history. He began his review by observing that the grand function of woman is, and ever must