SOURCE: "Shirley: Feminism and Power," in Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived, W. W. Norton and Company, 1976, pp. 152-89.

In the following excerpt, Moglen looks at the author's progression from Jane Eyre to Shirley as an attempt to turn from the personal to the political.

For reasons which I will shortly sketch, Charlotte Brontë turned away from the quasi-allegorical mode of Jane Eyre and attempted to write what she conceived as a social and political novel. She would, of course, not abandon the psychological conundrums she had explored in that violent and radical new myth of heterosexual relationship, but she would now emphasize the pressures of the workaday world. She would discipline herself, as she had announced she would try to do in The Professor, to the dictates of "realism."

Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake...