Journal

Here’s the first line:
Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the
north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one
or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and
ought to be doing a great deal of good’.
This is Jane Austen stuff – a not wildly dissimilar opening to ‘It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife’.
Jane Eyre was a success before Shirley was published; I personally had read Jane
Eyre before I read Shirley; we are told on the title page that this is by Currer
Bell the author of Jane Eyre.
But given all this background, I did have both experience and expectations
when picking up Shirley. The experience was of a
somewhat romantic journey, with Byronic heroes
and exotic foreign wives in the attic.I also know,
from general experience of authors and of artists in
general, that a second work is often both more
prosaic, and also something of a let-down after the
first. Indeed, going back to my opening remarks
referencing a fellow member who thought it was
unreadable, and our brief survey, this ‘let-down’
aspect goes some way to explaining that.
‘Something cool lies before you’ we are told in the
opening, the novel Shirley. And partly, that effect is
a reflection of how novelists and artists develop.
They start off simply, and the sheer power of
inspiration creates a convincing masterpiece. Then,
no doubt, with a sense of vertigo at the rapidity of their ascent, they outthink
themselves, they overcomplicate things, and they become more earnest.
Shirley is an analytical book, indeed it is analytical of text. There’s a nice line in
Chapter 36 where Shirley says: ‘A beautiful sentence! Let us take it to pieces!’
(And just to complete that story of simplistic starts and complicated middles
– in later life we often get a very high quality integration of the initial fervour,
and the subsequent youthful over-engineering, resulting in an assured mature
simplicity. Not that the Brontës really lived that long.)
I was still trying to keep on the straight and narrow. By the time I’d gotten
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