There is also Transit’s untimely relation to feminism. The second wave that was exploding all around through the years of its writing is barely evident in its pages, despite its interest in women’s lives. Shirley was not, then or ever, drawn to feminism; her concern with women’s authority and agency in the world was expressed through other modes. The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, a friend of her later years, describes Transit’s Caro Bell as “one of the great women characters of the modern novel—someone we recognize for a kind of strength at a time when feminism was not in the air, and so women possessed of such strength had no peg of doctrine to hang it on.” Bilgrami proposes that Caro’s situation is particularly poignant because, unlike her great antecedents—Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke—she “lives and loves in the decade just before the turn to feminism, and so all the reader’s urges on her behalf are of the sort we feel when we think of a ‘close miss’; and yet Shirley is confident in her resolve that these qualities of character and temperament in Caro might well be the more interesting for having missed.” There is in this view a richness in the combination of feminism’s proximity and its absence.