Together with some friends he watches all night, but the machinery is destroyed on the way to the mill by angry millworkers.

He is determined to restore his family's honour and fortune.Īs the novel opens, Robert awaits delivery of new labour-saving machinery for the mill which will enable him to lay off additional employees. His elder brother became a private tutor, leaving Robert to return the mill to profitability. The mill was inefficiently run by his late father and is already mortgaged. In fact he had no choice, since the mill is deeply in debt. He has laid off many of them, apparently indifferent to their consequent impoverishment. Robert Moore is a mill owner noted for apparent ruthlessness towards his employees - more than any other mill owner in town. Today it is regarded as a distinctly female name and an uncommon male name. Before the publication of the novel, Shirley was an uncommon - but distinctly male - name and would have been an unusual name for a woman. The title character was given the name that her father had intended to give a son. The novel's popularity led to Shirley's becoming a woman's name. The novel is set against a backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry. The novel is set in Yorkshire in the period 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. It was Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre. Shirley is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë.

Shirley by charlotte brontë illustrated