SOURCE: "Public Themes and Private Lives: Social Criticism in Shirley," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1968, pp. 74-84.

In this essay, Shapiro challenges the conventional criticism that the public and private realms in the novel are unconnected.

From the outset, critics of Charlotte Brontë's third novel, Shirley (published in 1849), have said that the book lacks unity. It has been charged repeatedly that there is no correlation in it between the social themes—for example, the Luddite rioting of the turn of the nineteenth century—and the private ones—the two love stories at the center of the book. Thus, G. H. Lewes asserts: "Shirley . . . is not a picture; but a portfolio of random sketches for one or more pictures. The authoress never seems distinctly to have made up her mind as to what she was to do; whether to describe the habits and manners...