Charlotte Brontë is one of the most famous women authors of nineteenth century England. She was the daughter of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell and the sister of Anne Brontë and Emily Brontë, in their own right authors of great repute. During her life she wrote four novels: Jane Eyre, written in 1847 just before Shirley in 1849, as well as Villette, and The Professor. Of these four the most well-known or successful is Jane Eyre which unfortunately overshadowed Shirley with its popularity and thereby denied Shirley the recognition it deserved as one of Brontë’s great works. Shirley tells the story of a Yorkshire milling community, Briarfield and portrays the conventions of the nineteenth century and its established patterns and framework of moral principles by describing the lives of the two central characters in the novel, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar. In this essay I have investigated the ideology of patriarchy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, showing how deeply rooted it was in the nineteenth century England, and how the novel’s female characters experienced and thought of this dominant ideology, how the patriarchal organisation of the society affected the lives of women.