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Monday
I have fallen in love with the fiction of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose North and South and Wives and Daughters I recently read for the first time (actually listened to). Since I’ve gone through all of Austen and the Bronte sisters countless times, it’s wonderfully fresh and delightful to be making a new friend. Gaskell addresses challenging social situations that intrigue me and then peoples them with memorable three-dimensional characters. Her heroines especially are marvelous.
There may be another reason for my attraction. Gaskell started publishing her novels shortly before my great-grandmother Eliza Scott was born. Eliza was a great lover of novels, as we know from a memoir she wrote in which she lists a number of her favorites. By imagining Eliza as the heroine in Gaskell’s family dramas, I get insight into how she used novels to narrativize her own life and confront her difficulties.
Not that Eliza mentions Gaskell in her memoir. Given how voracious a reader she was, however, she must have encountered some of her works. Eliza was born in 1857 in Barton while Gaskell’s first novel (Mary Barton) appeared in 1848 and was followed by North and South (1854-55) and Wives and Daughters, (1864-66).
The novels that Eliza mentions in her memoir are
–George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss
–Susan Warren’s Wide, Wide World (1850)
–Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and Heir of Redcliffe
–Unspecified novels by Charles Dickens and George Macdonald
–There’s also (I’m pretty sure) an indirect reference to Jane Eyre.
I’m fascinated by my great-grandmother’s account of how novels gave her comfort at a time of crisis. Here’s how she and her mother used Warren’s novel when her mother was dying:
On my 10th birthday, Mother gave me the Wide, Wide World and as a new baby arrived a few days later, she and I read it together while she was confined to her room. We both thought Ellen cried too much, but I thought she was very wonderful. Mother did not get well and during the summer went to the seashore for a while, Nellie [Eliza’s older sister] coming home from boarding school to help care for the little ones.
The two Gaskell novels I’ve read so far both feature young women who lose their mothers. In them we see the daughter taking care of her father, which was Eliza’s situation as well. In other words, I imagine the heroines as my great-grandmother while also imagining my Eliza processing her life through reading them. For instance, I can see her identifying with the following passage about the death of Margaret Hale’s mother in North and South:
Convulsions came on; and when they ceased, Mrs. Hale was unconscious. Her husband might lie by her shaking the bed with his sobs; her son’s strong arms might lift her tenderly up into a comfortable position; her daughter’s hands might bathe her face; but she knew them not. She would never recognise them again, till they met in Heaven.
Before the morning came all was over.
Then Margaret rose from her trembling and despondency, and became as a strong angel of comfort to her father and brother. …
Margaret sat with her father in the room of the dead. If he had cried, she would have been thankful. But he sate by the bed quite quietly; only, from time to time, he uncovered the face, and stroked it gently, making a kind of soft inarticulate noise, like that of some mother-animal caressing her young. He took no notice of Margaret’s presence. Once or twice she came up to kiss him; and he submitted to it, giving her a little push away when she had done, as if her affection disturbed him from his absorption in the dead. … Margaret’s heart ached within her. She could not think of her own loss in thinking of her father’s case. The night was wearing away, and the day was at hand, when, without a word of preparation, Margaret’s voice broke upon the stillness of the room, with a clearness of sound that startled even herself: “Let not your heart be troubled,” it said; and she went steadily on through all that chapter of unspeakable consolation.
It’s not only the deathbed scenes that Eliza would have been able to relate to. I’ve written in the past about how I’m fairly sure that she drew strength from Jane Eyre when she went against her father’s wishes and left him to become a governess. Here’s the passage from her memoir where she, like Jane, talks about feeling restless:
Father made strenuous objections at first, but I was glad to have the prospect of a change and of earning a little money. I was not needed at home and was restless at having nothing to do.
Gaskell too talks about the inner struggle to remain a dutiful daughter while feeling that one is stagnating at home. Although the following passage occurs after Margaret has lost both her parents, nevertheless she is still the constraint of living with relatives:
When they returned to town, Margaret fulfilled one of her sea-side resolves, and took her life into her own hands. Before they went to Cromer, she had been as docile to her aunt’s laws as if she were still the scared little stranger who cried herself to sleep that first night in the Harley Street nursery. But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem for woman, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
As I say, I don’t know for certain that Eliza Scott read Gaskell’s novels. Still, the novels become significantly more poignant while Eliza becomes more fleshed out when I imagine her as Margaret Hale or (in Wives and Daughters) as Molly Gibson.