SOURCE: Webb, Igor. “History and the Novel, and the Novel as History.” In From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 101-61. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Webb considers the historical accuracy of Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley.

I

The importance of the years 1812-13 to Charlotte Brontë is of course significantly different from their importance to Jane Austen. But to set Shirley next to Mansfield Park is first to appreciate the continuity of a special history, the history of women's feelings, and thus of repression and fulfillment, in the “middle ranks” of English society during the Industrial Revolution. Eugene Forçade said of Shirley that “as a picture of society, the novel could have been called Shirley, or the condition of women in the English middle class.”¹ This, then, is the substantive continuity. Both authors view human possibilities by reference...