Will she ever come back?

Abstract

Abstract Shirley opens with a robustly drawn ‘then and now’ framework. ‘Of late years,’ the unidentified narrator tells us, ‘an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England . . . but in eighteen-hundredeleven-twelve that affluent rain had not descended.’ Shirley’s ‘then’ is self-evidently 1811–12. Its ‘now’ (as Brontë’s subsequent reference to the Oxford Movement makes clear) is the period of writing and first publication of the novel, 1848–9. The location of the novel is as precisely staked out –– the West Riding of Yorkshire, a setting from which the narrative will not stray by so much as a yard into any neighbouring county.