Journal

The next layer of risk in this whole area of layers of fiction, and layers of
authorship, is a deepening duplicity and a growing loss of trust. I particularly
did a double-take on this passage:
Though I describe imperfect characters, I have not undertaken to
handle degraded or utterly infamous ones. Child-torturers, slave
masters and drivers, I consign to the hands of a jailor; the novelist may
be excused from sullying his page with the record of their deeds.
I’m a little unbalanced by the fact that the author refers to herself in the first
and third persons all in the one sentence. There is a link between selfconsciousness,
or heightened states of awareness, on the one hand, and the
Luddites, on the other. And I’m still uneasy about the double entendre of
‘something real lies before you’.
So – I’ll leave you with three questions, one of which I’ll have a stab at
answering, and two I’ll leave to you to think about.
1) Who is the author of the novel Shirley’?
At least seven candidates come to mind: Firstly, Charlotte Brontë the person;
secondly, Currer Bell the pseudonym; thirdly, Charlotte’s predecessors
amongst the world of novelists – this whole approach of having a chat with
the reader being done in the wake of prior exponents, and arguably done
better; fourthly, the characters in the book had a lash at authorship, notably
Louis Moore, sitting in the schoolroom writing about how he proposed to
Shirley. And as an aside, my take on that was that Jane Austen had ghost
written that part – because the phrasing ‘Could I now let her part as she had
always parted from me? No: I have gone too far not to finish’ was to my
ears an exact rip-off of Mr Knightley’s proposal to Emma; fifthly, reality was
an author, as we’ve seen in the case of Oakwell Hall and Anne Bronte; sixthly,
some mythical neighbour of Shirley’s in the fictional parish of Briarfield puts
her hand up as the author in the dying pages of the book. Or puts his hand
up. And, of course you, the reader.
These two I’ll leave to you:
2) Who is the reading audience of Shirley?
3) was her name really Shirley?
A useful reference:
Carol A Bock, ‘Storytelling and the Multiple Audiences of Shirley’ in Journal of
Narrative Technique
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