A quick look at the Wikipedia page on Luddites will put things in context if your British history is as lacking as mine.
The book has an interesting political and economic aspect. It's an interesting treatise on the independence and status of women in the early 19th century - long before there was much feminist activism. "Shirley" is something of a sleeper in the Bronte canon. Not an easy task in a book that you need a playbill for just to keep up. She is clear, well-paced, and gives different characters to all of the major persona. Sometimes she paints the delicate beauty of flower gardens in moonlight evenings but also of harsh, glaring Monday mornings, the gritty, sometimes mean realities and human flaws.įirst, Anna Bentinck gives a spectacular performance. Yet, there are even flashes of Johannes Vermeer's delicate brush strokes, brilliant colors and of love shinning in the eyes of the "Girl with the Pearl Earring". Charlotte Bronte paints with fine brush strokes one color, one image after another, piling them on the canvas until the ungainly rough features of her story takes form. If she were a portrait artist, her paintings would be in the fashion of Vincent van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters" or in the harsh interplay of shadow and light on the canvas of Edgar Degas.
My title quotes the author describing her story I think with accuracy. Now I have done it! The Bronte sisters will rise from their graves to pummel me as I sleep. Not to overstate the case, the sprinkle of comic characters would suggest an Austen influence. This story has dirt under the fingernails. The Charlotte who wrote Jane Eyre and the one who wrote Shirley seem to be different writers. After listening to this story, I now wonder if she wasn't influenced a bit after all. Charlotte had some negative thoughts about Austen and was not shy in expressing them. Charlotte Bronte had a dust-up with her publisher over his praise of Jane Austen. The oppressive sense of loneliness or despair which figure in the Bronte sisters' works, Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or Villette is somehow replaced with optimism and hope. Her voice reveals the subtle humor and touches of playfulness of the story. I knew the story or thought I knew the story but Anna Bentinck's performance allowed me to understand things which I had missed entirely. I have read this book many times since the seventies but this was my first time with the audio version.
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