http://elr.sciedupress.com English Linguistics Research Vol. 5, No. 2; 2016 Published by Sciedu Press 37 ISSN 1927-6028 E-ISSN 1927-6036 The Idea of Women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley Ali Albashir Mohammed Al-Haj 1 1 Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Department of English & literature, Jazan University, Jazan, Kingdom of Arabia Correspondence: Ali Albashir Mohammed Al-Haj, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Department of English &literature, Jazan University, P. O. Box 114, Jazan, Kingdom of Arabia. Received: February 20, 2015 Accepted: June 7, 2016 Online Published: June 12, 2016 doi:10.5430/elr.v5n2p37 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/elr.v5n2p37 Abstract The current study aims at studying critically the idea of women in Charlotte Bronte' Shirley .Also it aims at casting light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most prominent female novelist in the nineteenth century. It also traces Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist is concerned to convey a subjective impression. Furthermore, the study provides a historical and critical background of her age in which she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which affected and swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her writings. The study concludes, Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and social problems such as the position of women, but evades a solution to the complications by dropping the problem and substituting the conventional solution of love and marriage. Keywords: Charlotte Bronte Shirley, Spiritual, Subjective impression women, Love, Marriage 1. Introduction Charlotte Bronte is perhaps one of the most prominent female novelist in the nineteenth century .But she is in some ways even more typical .Of course, she is not so great a novelist as Dickens; apart from anything else she had a narrower range. Her range is confined to the inner life, the private passion. Indeed, Charlotte has stood the test of time and her works are still fascinating enough to attract readers and scholars of our time despite of her narrower range. Her imagination is stimulated to create by certain aspects of man' inner life as that of Dickens or Thackeray by certain aspects of his external life. As Thackeray was the first English writer to make the novel the vehicle of a conscious criticism of life, so she is the first to make it the vehicle of personal revelation. She is the first subjective novelist (Patricia, 1992: 45), the ancestor of Proust and Mr. James Joyce and all the rest of the historians of the private consciousness. And like their her range is limited to those aspect of experience which stimulate to significance and activity the private consciousness of their various heroes and heroines. According to Gaskell (1990: 133) : The life of Charlotte Bronte is very substance of her novels; three times she summarized what she had imagined, seen or felt. In Jane Eyre she depicted her imaginative life; in Villette, her true moral life; in Shirley, coming out of herself a little- though very little in fact- and standing as it were at the window of her soul, she depicted the corner of Yorkshire where she lived and what little she had seen of human society. Each of her books has therefore a very marked character in the first, Jane Eyre, Villette, the best parts of Shirley, are not exercises of the mind, but cries of the heart; not a deliberate self-diagnosis, but an involuntary self-revelation. Fundamentally, her principal characters are all the same person; and that is Charlotte Bronte. Her range is confined, not only to a direct expression of an individuals' emotions and impression, but to a direct expression of Charlotte Bronte's emotions and impressions. In this, her final limitations, we come indeed to the distinguishing fact of her character as a novelist. The world she creates is the world of her own inner life; she is her own subject. This does not mean, of course, that she never writes about anything about her own character .She is a story-teller, and a story shows character in action, character, that is, as it appears in contact with the world of external event and personality. Only the relation of Charlotte Bronte's imagination to this world is different from that of most novelist.. In this context Gaskell (ibid,p132) points out that; Charlotte Bronte has struck only one cord of the human heart, the most powerful it is true. In Shirley , the imagination alone speaks and when imagination is sole master one can be sure that it will run to strange, fiery passions , difficult of interpretations