Shirley
Set in Yorkshire during the Luddite disturbances, the novel follows two women: Caroline Helstone, who is quietly going mad with a life that offers her nothing to do, and Shirley Keeldar, who owns an estate and says what she thinks. Around them, mill owners and frame-breakers negotiate with threats.
Charlotte Brontë wrote it after the deaths of her siblings, and grief shows in the way the book keeps returning to empty rooms. It is uneven and sometimes preachy, but the portrait of a woman's enforced idleness is one of the most direct pieces of social criticism she wrote.
Public-domain status
First published in 1849. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, so this work has been free to republish there since 1926.
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