This chapter considers the ways in which Charlotte Brontë uses the gender roles of medievalism, which were so central to the fiction published in the Lady’s Magazine in the late eighteenth century, to explore women’s place in history and in contemporary society. Studies of Charlotte Brontë’s engagement with medievalism and Romance have focused mainly on her negotiations with the discourse in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853). This chapter demonstrates how Brontë uses medievalism widely throughout Shirley (1849), despite the apparent rejection of the discourse on the novel’s first page, to reflect on the contradictory situation of women in society, both in her mid-nineteenth-century present, and in the comparatively recent past.
