The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor

Following Elizabeth Gaskell’s defence of her friend’s posthumous reputation in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë has frequently been associated with ideas of static and feminised local place. In Shirley, however, the extent of Brontë’s preoccupation with a more expansive vision of global space and mobility becomes apparent. This chapter explores Shirley’s sophisticated understanding of global space and mobility and reveals Brontë’s topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of her friendship and correspondence with the emigrant Mary Taylor, the model for Shirley’s Rose Yorke. It concludes by showing how Taylor’s own powerful fiction and travel writing can be viewed as one of Brontë’s most radical legacies; one which has been obscured by Gaskell’s more famous memorialisation.