In chapter 9 of Shirley, Charlotte Brontë gives us a brief, vivid description of the Yorke family's domestic life. Among the six children, the twelve-year-old Rose stands out for her strength of character. Although her strong-minded, dour mother would like to turn Rose into a copy of herself, 'a woman of dark and dreary duties', the girl is of a very different, independent mould. She has 'a mind full-set, thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew' and it 'is agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and repressed' (S, 148). Later, Rose shares her impressions of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian with Caroline Helstone: the gothic romance, she says, feeds her longings to travel, and she expansively gestures to the breadth of her hunger for experience: