My title quotes the author describing her story I think with accuracy. Now I have done it! The Bronte sisters will rise from their graves to pummel me as I sleep. Not to overstate the case, the sprinkle of comic characters would suggest an Austen influence. This story has dirt under the fingernails. The Charlotte who wrote Jane Eyre and the one who wrote Shirley seem to be different writers. After listening to this story, I now wonder if she wasn't influenced a bit after all. Charlotte had some negative thoughts about Austen and was not shy in expressing them. Charlotte Bronte had a dust-up with her publisher over his praise of Jane Austen. The oppressive sense of loneliness or despair which figure in the Bronte sisters' works, Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or Villette is somehow replaced with optimism and hope. Her voice reveals the subtle humor and touches of playfulness of the story. I knew the story or thought I knew the story but Anna Bentinck's performance allowed me to understand things which I had missed entirely. When was the last time you saw a modern soliloquy? And I thus enjoyed them as a counterpoint to the fast-paced shallow interactions that surround us today in popular literature and media.I have read this book many times since the seventies but this was my first time with the audio version. Maybe as they would have said things after a period of reflection. At first, I was put off by the excessive sagacity-in-dialog, but in my second pass through, I decided that, ala Shakespeare, the perceptions, interactions and converse were highly stylized versions of what people might really say to each other. And for me, I have gained much to nuance my historical studies of the era.

Shirley and Caroline won't jerk tears from your eyes, but I could feel the intensity of their responses to social constraints. There is an air of optimism before the darkness of Dickens. If you want the flavor of life, politics, religion and economics in late 18th early 19th century England, I would add this work to those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Frances Burney, and of course Austen and the rest of the Bronte collection.

Look at the cover - get a canoe and just glide around on that pond.

Shirley by charlotte bronte review