SOURCE: An introduction to Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Andrew Hook and Judith Hook, Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 7-32.

In this introduction to Shirley, the Hooks explore the various social themes of the novel as well as the circumstances under which it was written and the intentions of its author.

With Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë achieved the kind of success denied to all but a handful of writers, the kind of success that soars beyond the approval of critics and reading-public alike. Jane Eyre belongs to that select company of books which have passed into a nation's literary consciousness. An extraordinary combination of life and art, romance and realism, and compelling imaginative power, it appeals so widely at so many different levels that our normal critical procedures are made to seem superfluous or irrelevant. For its author's other books, however, the triumph of Jane Eyre has produced a...