Charlotte Bronte : Shirley

Passionate and pain-filled, ferocious in their feeling, Jane Eyre and Villette celebrate the individual. In Shirley Charlotte Brontë chose to look wider to examine 'the warped nature of things'.

Written after the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, she found it a struggle to finish and in her portraits of Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone Charlotte Brontë poured out her feelings for her dead sisters. Nevertheless, it is a historical novel which depicts an uneasy era of Luddite riots, bad harvests and social unrest as well as Charlotte Brontë's belief that the denial of the world of feeling is responsible for much of society's suffering.

Tense, romantic, atmospheric, ringing with imaginative power, Charlotte Brontë's story of the two women and the men they loved grips until the last page.