At first glance, Shirley looks like a practice run for Emma, a collection of pleasant, straightforward maid stories featuring prototype versions of William, Eleanor, and Emma. A closer examination, however, reveals that Shirley is, in fact, a series of detailed character sketches exploring the relationships between three maids and their respective employers. And while some of these sketches aren’t entirely successful — Kaoru Mori cheerfully describes one as “an extremely cheap story about a boy and an animal” — the five chapters focusing on thirteen-year-old Shirley Madison and her independent, headstrong employer are as good as any passage in Emma.
That employer is twenty-eight-year-old Bennett Cranley, a smart, resourceful beauty. Though Bennett comes from a proper Victorian family, she deflects talk of marriage, instead taking pleasure in single-handedly running her own tavern. Of course, finding time to clean house and cook meals is a challenge when you spend most of the day on the job, so Bennett does what many of us working gals wish we could do: she advertises for a maid. The sole applicant is Shirley Madison, a neat, quiet girl who has no family and no home, but does have experience dusting, sewing, and baking “tipsy cake” — the deciding factor for Bennett, who hires Shirley on the spot.
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