Journal

even a few chapters into the novel, I was beginning to suspect that the
something real that ‘lies before me’ on page one was lying in the mendacious
sense of the word ‘lies’ – but for the moment, I was taking this all at face
value, and expecting a less romantic and more realistic novel, with nothing else
much changing from Jane Eyre apart from a relaxing shift back to an
omniscient third-person author, and a shift to more day-to-day themes – the
downtrodden circumstances of women in early 19th century England; and
the downtrodden circumstances of textile workers staring down the barrel of
technological unemployment.
Regardless of the subject matter of a novel, it’s easy for readers, of the 21st
century as in any other century, to expect the all-knowing third-person narrator
in a novel – or indeed an artist or a film-maker – to keep his or her head below
the parapet. We expect them to be as invisible as they are assured. It maybe
charming that, in the film version of the Wizard of Oz, you can see one of the
camera crew dodging behind tree, but it’s not particularly edifying.
From our earliest days, it’s been: ‘Once upon a time there were four little
Rabbits, and their names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter’. We
imagine it, and we believe it, and some of us may still expect much the same
thing from a mature novel.
In Shirley, however, a major departure from this approach is a constant series
of reminders that we are readers, and that we are reading a novel.
Here are some examples, of which there are very many, as to how we are
continually reminded that we are reading a novel:
A female voice called to him ... the answer, and the rest of the
conversation was in French, but as this is an English book, I shall
translate it into English.
The black-muzzled, tawny dog, a glimpse of which was seen in the
chapter which first introduced its mistress to the reader ...
The Caroline of this evening was not, (as you know reader), the
Caroline of every day.
This is a little unusual, but not disastrously so, and if Charlotte Brontë is a little
outrageous, so too is she inviting and welcoming:
So on a basic level this can be a little surprising, but correspondingly engaging,
and personally I did find it engaging – at least until I had had further
experience of the limitless duplicity of the wily Charlotte Brontë as I
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