poliphilo: (corinium)
poliphilo ([personal profile] poliphilo) wrote2013-08-11 05:49 pm

Still Blogging Shirley

An army of two hundred workless working men attacks the mill. They are met with gunfire. Our two heroines watch from higher ground and carefully describe the battle to one another. It's like the script for a radio play.

Still, we needed that. We'd had more than enough maidenly moping.

Bronte's politics are benevolent old-school Tory. She thinks the upper classes should be charitable and the lower classes duly grateful. She tilts the balance by portraying the radical agitators as drunks, hypocrites and loonies.

There's a lot of Yorkshire pride and a lot of Yorkshire dialect. Full marks for this. A snobby curate who says snobby things about Northern folk gets chucked out t'house.

It's a bad novel, but it's a bad novel by a writer of genius. Therefore one persists. I think I know how it's going to end.