Comparing Gaskell's Life

A new paper published in the latest issue of The Gaskell Journal:

Comparing Temporalities in The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Ancient Melodies: Conflicted Self-Image in British and Chinese Women's Life Writings

Liu, Bonnie

The Gaskell Journal; Knutsford Vol. 37,  (2023): 43-65

This article compares Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Ancient Melodies, an autobiographical novel by Ling Shuhua, a twentieth-century Chinese female writer. In a personal letter, Woolf strongly recommended The Life of Charlotte Brontë to her Chinese friend. Over the years, the connection between Ling and Woolf has attracted considerable attention. However, there are no studies that investigate why Woolf introduced Gaskell’s life writing to Ling, despite her notorious comments on Victorian biographies, or connections between the life writings of Gaskell and Lin
g themselves. Through a focus on contrastive ideas of time which are present in both The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Ancient Melodies, I discern a connection between the two texts that might explain Woolf ’s recommendation of Gaskell’s biography: both texts consider the tensions between women’s domestic and creative ‘selves’ in a patriarchal context. This article examines how Gaskell’s narrator deploys two modes of mid-nineteenth-century patriarchal culture.