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PLOT: Robert Moore is a mill owner noted for apparent ruthlessness towards his employees - more than any other mill owner in town. Before the publication of the novel, Shirley was an uncommon - but distinctly male - name and would have been an unusual name for a woman.Today it is regarded as a distinctly female name and an uncommon male name. 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 (originally published under Brontë's pseudonym Currer Bell). By critiquing the High and Low Church parties in Shirley, Charlotte Brontë suggests that the Church should not be distracted by excessive debate over forms and rituals (High Church) or by an undue emotionalism that encourages revolutionary tendencies (Low Church).Shirley is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. In the world of the novel, a healthy Church is portrayed as essential to England's social well-being. Shirley depicts the danger of the Established Church's becoming overly Catholic, overly Protestant, or overly disconnected from society. 1 1 I will use ‘Church of England’, ‘the Church’ and ‘the Established Church’ throughout this article to refer to the Anglican Church. Despite the novel's portrayal of two important aspects of the 'condition of England' - the need for improved industrial relations between mill-owners and workers, and improved gender relations between men and women - Shirley's most persistent and pervasive call for reform centres on the Church of England.

Of her four novels, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) is the one most concerned with the 'condition of England' question.