ABSTRACT
The Victorian woman's domestic vocation is customarily described in terms of the jurisdiction of social spaces, and in terms of actual physical demarcation. The ideology of separate spheres, correspondingly, employs a rhetoric of territoriality which links it simultaneously with property, class difference and provincial identity. Shirley takes up this conjunction of gender politics, social boundaries, and regionalism in the landed property of its independent eponymous heroine.3 Shirley's estate encompasses both the 'windowed grave' of Briarfield Rectory, in which Caroline Helstone feels herself buried, and Robert Moore's mill: the propertied woman's sphere is coterminous with the entire district, taking in both the intensely private realm of the retiring spinster and the openly violent public realm of the factory. This is an important structural and political device, and in order to understand what it means for Shirley to hand over her property to the new squire when she marries, we must account for the provincial meanings to which her ownership is so closely linked, and the politics of female authorship which Bronte is exploring through the politics of provincialIsm.
