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