Name: Shirley
ISBN: 9780140430950

Synopsis

Its focus is less on individual men and women, although their stories add compulsive drama and tension, than on the individual perceived in close relation with the forces moulding society. Charlotte Brontë chose to set it during the Napoleonic Wars - a period of bad harvests, Luddite riots, economic unrest and the oppression of women - in order to grapple with social and political issues. In her story of two contrasting heroines and the men they love can be traced her wish to reconcile the world of romantic love and fulfilment with the gritty realities of suffering, obligation and social duty.

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About Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels are English literature standards. Under the pen name Currer Bell, she wrote Jane Eyre. ([Source][1].) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Brontë Her sisters, Anne and Emily, first published their works as Acton and Ellis Bell.

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Quotes

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“God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.”

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“You may search my countenance, but you cannot read it.”

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“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”

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“Painful indeed is the panegyric of those we contemn.”

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