Elizabeth Gaskell: Second Edition

208 Pages·2007·0.83 MB·English

by  Patsy Stoneman

prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page i
Elizabeth Gaskell
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page ii
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page iii
Elizabeth Gaskell
Second edition
Patsy Stoneman
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page iv
Copyright © Patsy Stoneman 1987, 2006
The right of Patsy Stoneman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published 1987 by Harvester Press
This edition published 2006 byManchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
andRoom 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 7447 9 paperback
EAN 978 0 7190 7447 9
This edition first published 2006
10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset
by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton
Printed in Great Britain
by CPI, Bath
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page v
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition pageix
Preface to the First Edition xi
References and Abbreviations xiii
1 Reading Elizabeth Gaskell:The Story So Far and Some
New Suggestions 1
2 Woman and Writer:Blending the Selves 14
3 Two Nations and Separate Spheres:Class and Gender in
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Work 30
4 Mary Barton(1848) 45
5 Cranford(1851) 57
6 Ruth(1853) 65
7 North and South(1854) 78
8 Sylvia’s Lovers(1863) 92
9 Cousin Phillis(1863) 105
10 Wives and Daughters(1865) 112
Conclusion 132
Afterword: The Critical Debate, 1985–2004 136
References 172
Select Bibliography 181
Index 183
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page vi
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page vii
This book is dedicated to the person who made me feel
able to write it
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page viii
prelims 20/7/06 9:39 am Page ix
Preface to the Second Edition
When I wrote this book in the mid-nineteen-eighties, it was in a pio-
neering spirit. True, ‘Mrs’ Gaskell had been revived to some extent by
the Marxist critics of the nineteen-fifties, who had put Mary Bartonand
North and South on university syllabuses along with other ‘minor’
works such as Disraeli’s Sybil and Kingsley’s Alton Locke. The nineteen-
seventies feminist revival, however, which lauded the works of the
Brontës and George Eliot, had largely ignored Gaskell. Apart from her
‘social-problem’ novels, Gaskell’s image in 1987 was still much what it
had been in 1934, when Lord David Cecil compared her with those
other Victorians. ‘In the placid dovecotes of Victorian womanhood’, he
wrote, ‘they were eagles. But we only have to look at a portrait of Mrs.
Gaskell, soft-eyed, beneath her charming veil, to see that she was a dove’
(Cecil 1934: 198). In the millennial year, however, an article on Gaskell
could be entitled ‘The Dove Ascending’: ‘it is now possible’, its author
claimed, ‘to argue that Elizabeth Gaskell is pre-eminent among Victorian
women novelists’ (Pittock 2000: 531). I believe that my book played an
important part in this re-evaluation of Gaskell’s work. Indeed, the whole
Key Women Writers series in which it first appeared was a landmark in
feminist literary studies. Even in this company, however, Gaskell was still
an anomaly, not an obvious choice for feminist treatment. While grate-
ful for the work of a few lonely forerunners, I still felt like a voice crying
in the wilderness.
Clearly much has happened in Gaskell studies since 1987: in the same
year as my book, the Gaskell Society was founded, which, with its schol-
arly Journal, has done much to encourage and disseminate serious work;
biographies drawing on greatly enlarged data have helped to dispel
Gaskell’s purely domestic image; new approaches to narrative strategy
have revealed her skill as a story-teller; and a subtler kind of feminism has