TEHRAN-A new translation of the Novel “Shirley, A Tale” written by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë has been released in bookstores across Iran.

Lida Tarzi has translated the book into Persian and Neyestan Publishers has printed it in 296 pages, Mehr reported.

Originally published in 1849, it was Brontë's second published novel after “Jane Eyre”. Following the tremendous 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” 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. The book navigates the friendship between these two young women as well as their thoughts about marriage and love.

As many critics have noted, Shirley has a number of different plot strands, loosely drawn together. It can be read as a romantic tale, as a sociological comment on the question of women’s lives, or as a history of the Luddite riots in the cloth-making district of Yorkshire.

A work that combines social commentary with the more private preoccupations of “Jane Eyre,” “Shirley” demonstrates the full range of Brontë's literary talent. “Shirley is a revolutionary novel,” wrote Brontë biographer Lyndall Gordon. “Shirley follows Jane Eyre as a new exemplar but so much a forerunner of the feminists of the later twentieth century that it is hard to believe in her actual existence in 1811-12. She is a theoretic possibility: what a woman might be if she combined independence and means of her own with intellect. Charlotte Brontë imagined a new form of power, equal to that of men, in a confident young woman [whose] extraordinary freedom has accustomed her to think for herself. “Shirley” [is] Brontë's most feminist novel.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature.

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