SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “The Genesis of Hunger According to Shirley.” In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp. 372-98. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Gilbert and Gubar evaluate Charlotte Brontë's use of food metaphors in Shirley to describe a more pervasive hunger afflicting women writers and characters in the patriarchal culture of nineteenth-century England.

I was, being human, born alone; I am, being woman, hard beset; I live by squeezing from a stone The little nourishment I get. 

—Elinor Wylie

There is nothing to be said against Charlotte's frenzied efforts to counter the nihilism of her surroundings, unless one is among those who would find amusement in the sight of the starving fighting for food.

—Rebecca West

 In times of the most extreme symbols The walls are very thin, Almost transparent. Space...