SOURCE: "Currer Bell's Shirley," in Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë, edited by Barbara Timm Gates, G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 217-23.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1850 in the Edinburgh Review, Lewes criticizes the characters in Shirley as unnatural and unrealistic, despite the author's claim that they are drawn from real life.

Shirley is inferior to Jane Eyre in several important points. It is not quite so true; and it is not so fascinating. It does not so rivet the reader's attention, nor hurry him through all obstacles of improbability, with so keen a sympathy in its reality. It is even coarser in texture, too, and not unfrequently flippant; while the characters are almost all disagreeable, and exhibit intolerable rudeness of manner. In Jane Eyre life was viewed from the standing point of individual experience; in Shirley that standing point is frequently abandoned, and the artist paints only...