Mrs Gaskell's revival

Heather Glen has written an interesting article on Mrs Gaskell for the Times Literary Supplement with the excuse of reviewing the recent Works of Elizabeth Gaskell published by Pickering and Chatto (more details). Despite its considerable length, we encourage you to read it, because it looks into why Mrs Gaskell may not be as well-known as her peers or why she deserves to be more widely read.

We will just quote a couple of things of special notice. Otherwise we might get carried away and paste the whole article here ;)

Characteristically, in Gaskell’s fictions – and in her Life of Charlotte Brontë – a shape emerges gradually, through the delineation of shifting and contending feelings, the accumulation of detail, rather than by any more marked authorial assertiveness. [...]
And her writings are punctuated by arresting moments of such “seeing”. In the opening pages of Ruth, the heroine, one of a group of seamstresses working through the night in an airless room to finish a “beautiful ball-gown”, presses her face against the window, and gazes “at the deep snow which had been falling silently ever since the evening before”. In North and South, a girl worn out with making plans for her wedding lies asleep in a cloud of white muslin and blue ribbons on a crimson damask sofa in a comfortable back drawing-room. The Life of Charlotte Brontë patiently details every word of the inscriptions on a memorial tablet, where as one name succeeds another “the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped”. [...]
In her Life of Charlotte Brontë (as Christopher Ricks has brilliantly shown), Gaskell uses retrospection and prolepsis to powerful and moving effect.

In The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller argues that Mrs Gaskell shaped the real Charlotte Brontë into the kind of religious, pious, obedient daughter and woman typical of the Victorian Era, the so-called "angel of the house", instead of displaying the real, passionate woman who had written Jane Eyre or Villette. She did so often by maligning the people around her too, giving birth to images such as Patrick Brontë as a cruel father, etc. But those were very different times, and even though it was a regrettable technique, it was the best she could do to save her friend's reputation. Besides, it was nothing new. Charlotte Brontë herself, in her Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, paints her sisters as countryfied, ignorant girls so that they didn't stand out for the wrong reasons.

This fabulous new, complete edition of Elizabeth Gaskell works simply appears to have it all:

Now Pickering and Chatto, known for their collected editions of neglected or out-of-fashion authors, have produced the first comprehensive critical and textual edition of all Elizabeth Gaskell’s known works. These ten substantial volumes contain her five full-length novels and her Life of Charlotte Brontë, a diary and poems written during the early days of her motherhood, journalism and reviews, and shorter fictions of varying length and seriousness. The purpose of such an edition, amply fulfilled by this one, is to establish authoritative texts for future scholars to work with, to record variants scrupulously, and to contextualize the works it presents by providing explanatory footnotes and a clear account of the production and reception of each text. But it can also disclose, in a way that a series of disconnected works do not, the nature of a writer’s achievement and the shape of a writing life.
The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, under the General Editorhsip of Joanne Shattock, is not merely more comprehensive than any edition we have previously had, but rather differently arranged. It gives due weight to Gaskell’s shorter fictions, many of them written in the eight-year gap between North and South (1855) and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), and hitherto largely marginalized as “other tales”. It enables the reader to see her development as a writer, from her first three “social-problem” novels to her later fictions of middle-class provincial experience, her experiments in a variety of genres. The careful revisions recorded in the textual notes reveal that that fluent prose was much thought about and worked over. The explanatory endnotes indicate the range of her interests, her close attention to detail, her accuracy of reference. The Gaskell presented in these volumes is not a charming sentimentalist, but shrewd, observant, perceptive; a serious craftswoman, who laboured over her writing and explored the potentialities of different kinds and lengths of narrative, whose apparently transparent realism was not unconsidered, but a deeply pondered art.

Whenever we read one of Mrs Gaskell's novels and/or stories we simply feel as if we were sitting opposite her, who is sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fire, surrounding us with her story. Hopefully, the efforts to bring her to her rightful position in Literature in general and Victorian Literature in particular, are not finished with this amazing edition.

A Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by Jill Matus, is to appear early in 2007.

The Cambridge University Press website has further info on this. It will be released both in hardback (ISBN: 0521846765; £45) and paperback (ISBN: 0521609267; £16.99) and will be about 240 pages long. This is the description:

In the last few decades Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. The essays in this Companion draw on recent advances in biographical and bibliographical studies of Gaskell and cover the range of her impressive and varied output as a writer of novels, biography, short stories, and letters. The volume, which features well-known scholars in the field of Gaskell studies, focuses throughout on her narrative versatility and her literary responses to the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations of her time. This Companion will be invaluable for students and scholars of Victorian literature, and includes a chronology and guide to further reading.

• Each of Gaskell's major works receives a chapter, including North and South, Wives and Daughters
• Wide range of contextual material on Gaskell's life and times
• The most comprehensive single volume on this important Victorian writer

Contents
Chronology of Elizabeth Gaskell Nancy Weyant; 1. Introduction Jill L. Matus; 2. The life and letters of E. C. Gaskell Deirdre d'Albertis; 3. Mary Barton and North and South Jill L. Matus; 4. Cranford and Ruth Audrey Jaffe; 5. Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë Linda Peterson; 6. Sylvia's Lovers and other historical fiction Marion Shaw; 7. Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and modernity Linda K. Hughes; 8. Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter pieces Shirley Foster; 9. Gaskell, gender, and the family Patsy Stoneman; 10. Gaskell and social transformation Nancy Henry; 11. Unitarian dissent John Chapple; 12. Gaskell then and now Susan Hamilton; Guide to further reading Natalie Rose; Index.

Contributors
Nancy Weyant, Jill L. Matus, Deirdre d'Albertis, Audrey Jaffe, Linda Peterson, Marion Shaw, Linda K. Hughes, Shirley Foster, Patsy Stoneman, Nancy Henry, John Chapple, Susan Hamilton, Natalie Rose

So, you see, there's so MUCH more to Mrs Gaskell than just North & South. So reading Heather Glen's enlightening article is a great way to start rediscovering this great story-teller.

Categories: Victorian Era, Books, Biography