HE suggestion in your profile of Elizabeth Gaskell (Comment, last week) that she indulged in a “flirtation” with the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton when they were in Rome together in 1857 can of course mean anything, but since there has always been speculation about this relationship it is worth pointing out that Norton – himself a somewhat austere figure – was a friend not only of Elizabeth, but of all the Gaskell family. As well as his correspondence with her he wrote frequently to her husband and her two elder daughters, continuing to do so long after her death.
Furthermore, on the Rome visit Gaskell was in the company of two of her daughters, and various other friends; the opportunities for flirtation of any kind would have been extremely limited.
To suggest that there was anything illicit in their relationship is to misunderstand the nature of Victorian friendship. As to the Gaskell marriage, they certainly spent a lot of time apart – she liked foreign travel and he didn’t – but they were never less than protective of each other’s interests whether apart or together.
The main point against such a thing is connected to Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë:
It is worth mentioning that, in her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell reserved her fiercest invective for a middle-aged lady called Mrs Robinson whom she believed to have behaved improperly with the considerably younger Branwell Brontë. She was hardly likely to have played Mrs Robinson to Norton.Relish Now! reviews Valerie Martin's Trespass and Wuthering Heights, once again, gets a mention:
Brendan tells us what we are watching; Chloe shows us how. She is commissioned to illustrate Wuthering Heights, the story of Heathcliff, the ultimate “interloper” who is “driven by the ungovernable passion recommended by Blake” (all words that aptly describe Chloe’s nemesis, Salome). In her re-creation of the grave being dug up, “The scene is framed by a window ledge, putting the viewer in the moral position of a voyeur.” We are watching “this midnight grave robbing going on over there,” and we are complicit in Martin’s construction. (Robert Moyer)La Terrasse reviews the recent Penguin edition of Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia, Tales of Angria, edited by Heather Glen. A very interesting post that we highly recommend:
It must have been the summer of 1996, because I still have the essay I handed in the following November. It was some way into that year’s long vacation from university, and Villette was on the reading list for the forthcoming Victorian module. I read the opening chapters on a family picnic while others paddled in the stream or sunbathed or read too. The first thing I noticed was that the prose was awkward, the phrasing all backwards (from the first page: ‘When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit’). The second thing was the prickly but endearing friendship between Polly, a precocious little girl of six, and Graham, a ‘faithless-looking youth of sixteen’. (Chris)(Read more)The Brontë Parsonage Blog informs of an event taking place in Haworth next Friday, Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film Rebecca will be shown. More information, here. The Brussels Brontë Reading Group comments on their first meetings:
There are about twelve of us and we meet every few weeks for informal discussion of the latest book read. We have an interesting mix of members of all ages and several different nationalities, with a majority of native English speakers.Finally, Illiterarty briefly summarizes Charlotte Brontë's biography and Suite101 now covers Jane Eyre at Lowood.
Since this was an initiative of our Brontë group we felt we had to start with a Brontë work and so our first book was Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels novel The Professor, which few had read before. We will be reading a mixture of Brontë and other 19th century authors including Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot. At our most recent meeting we talked about Jane Austen’s Emma and the next work on our list is Bleak House. (Helen MacEwan)
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