Mooring Points: Manly Leaders, Trade, and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

This article focuses on the often demonized mill owner Robert Moore from Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley. In her character Robert Moore, Brontë portrays a manly leader who is rooted in a particular Yorkshire locale, and who, by the end of the novel, is able to help the region recover from unemployment and threats of starvation. I consider how Moore is repeatedly conflated with the mill throughout the novel, primarily through the form (and arguably, formless-ness) of the novel and discrepancies in diegetic and narrative time and argue that the compression of time within Shirley is evocative of the way communities that come under capitalism experience a speeding-up of time, of the way that production is sped up because of technological innovations like the frames. Through Brontë’s use of time and gender in her notoriously plot-less novel, she is both recuperating factories and industrial capitalism, while advocating for the importance of a specifically English locale as a mooring point for England’s economy and economic leaders.