Following the tremendously popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning." Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.I recommend this book to young women and their mothers, as well as their brothers and fathers. It could well be a text in a top university business core curriculum as in touches on issues of roles and attitudes in creating plans to be fulfilled and communities to be created in conditions of turmoil caused by technology, international conflict, capital availability, government fiat, market instability, and labor displacement.--Submitted by Anonymous.