SOURCE: Zlotnick, Susan. “The Fortunate Fall.” In Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 62-122. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Zlotnick examines how Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley represents history, noting the author's ambivalent treatment of the Luddites. The critic asserts that the reaction to industrial capitalism by female writers was complex and very different from that of nineteenth-century male writers.

Charlotte Brontë's second published novel, the much-anticipated successor to Jane Eyre, must have indeed seemed like a dish of “cold lentils and vinegar without oil” to readers expecting the Sturm und Drang of the first. Despite Brontë's significant achievement, Shirley is not a novel calculated to keep readers on the edge of their chairs, turning pages until the small hours of the morning. As Brontë acknowledges in a letter to William Smith Williams, “Those who were most charmed with ‘Jane...