12 November: Boreham on Elizabeth Gaskell

A Lady of Mettle
Elizabeth Gaskell, the anniversary of whose death this happens to be, was an uncommonly pretty girl. Unlike most of our great literary ladies, she captivated with her first glance. George Eliot was admittedly a thorough-paced frump, Charlotte Bronte was not only small and plain: she gloried in her plainness. Jane Austen was lively but not lovely. Mrs. Gaskell, however, was renowned for her beauty. Miss Flora Masson tells us that her comely features, her perfect hands, her quiet, melodious voice, and her grace of movement were all equally charming. To the end of her days her exquisite eyes retained their lustre and her smile its sweetness.

Poets, they say, learn in suffering what they teach in song. But the poets have no monopoly in that regard. Grief played a very prominent part in shaping the remarkable career of Mrs. Gaskell. On the day of her birth her mother died; and it was the death of her own son—her only boy—that turned her thoughts to fiction. To have a son was the dream of all her days. After 12 years of wedded life, her passionate desire was granted her, But the child died almost at once. The shock of this catastrophe threatened to wreck the reason of the distracted mother. Fortunately, her husband recalled the more or less serious aspiration towards literary achievement to which she had given expression during their courtship. Once, indeed, five years after their marriage, she had even completed her short manuscript and had sent it to Mr. William Howitt, who not only published it but entreated her to persevere. Mr. Howitt was profoundly impressed by the acute penetration and the lively fancy of his new correspondent. The force, the grace, and the charm of her style struck him as being altogether exceptional. He urged her to devote her outstanding talents to a literary career. But, at that moment, the young mother, with her husband and her garden of girls, had other fish to fry; how, could she coquette with the tantalising notion?

The Resort To Fiction As An Antidote To Fact
Seven years later, however, when her life seemed to be in ruins, her husband reminded her of this earlier experience and coaxed her once more to her desk. "You have always said you would write a novel," he pleaded, challengingly, "now set to work! It will engage all your time and strength, will transport your imagination into other scenes and will gratify the ambition you have cherished for so long!" She at first shook her head sadly and seemed disinclined to make the venture. But, on reflection, she recognised the wisdom of her husband's plea; she pulled herself together, gathered up her powers for a supreme endeavour, went to her desk and wrote the opening pages of "Mary Barton." It was some years before she tasted the sweets of success. In those days, although Fanny Burney and Jane Austen had done much to shatter the ancient prejudice, the woman-novelist was still regarded with suspicion and distrust. Ladies were compelled to write anonymously. Publishers fought shy of petticoats.

During those agonising years in which Charlotte Bronte's first manuscript was being forwarded to one publishing house after another, Mrs. Gaskell was playing a similar game of battledore and shuttlecock with "Mary Barton." In one office it lay unread for 12 solid months. Indeed, the rebuffs were so persistent and the delays so protracted that Mrs. Gaskell dismissed the whole thing from her mind, lived for her husband and her daughters, and, she assures us, forgot that such a person as Mary Barton had ever existed. But Mary Barton was not to be so easily disposed of. Messrs Chapman and Hall at length offered her £100 for the copyright, and the book met with immediate success, running through several editions and being translated into other languages.

A New Writer Crowned By The Old Masters
Charles Dickens, who was about to launch his "Household Words," eagerly sought Mrs. Gaskell's co-operation. "I should set a value on your help," he wrote, "which your modesty can scarcely imagine. My profound and unaffected admiration of your book makes me very earnest in my request." Her society was sought by men like Thackeray and Ruskin and by women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Florence Nightingale. She formed the intimate friendship of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Both of these eminent ladies capitulated unconditionally to her winsomeness and fascination, and both have borne witness to the impress upon their own lives and upon their own work of her magnetic personality and gracious influence. Charlotte Bronte died in 1855 at the age of 39, and Mrs. Gaskell determined to forsake the path of fiction in order to embalm the memory of her friend in a worthy biography. It is in some respects the most readable lifestory ever written. Indeed, some critics aver that Mrs. Gaskell brought too much of the temper and method of the novelist to her task as a biographer. The emotional quality, they think, is too emphatic and pronounced, but she certainly produced a work that will always be numbered among the classics of its kind.

Then, returning to romance, Mrs. Gaskell wrote an armful of novels that even "Mary Barton" cannot put to shame. At the age of 55 she secretly resolved, out of her literary earnings, to purchase a beautiful home in Hampshire as a surprise gift to her husband, and it was while visiting this house, in the execution of that wifely scheme, that the end suddenly came. Chatting with her three daughters, she passed away without a moment's warning, bequeathing to posterity the memory of a Christian woman of pure, simple, and unaffected goodness who, in the hour of her bitterest sorrow, like an oyster producing its pearl from its pain, had devoted exceptional talents to the highest possible ends. Men like Dickens, Carlyle, and Walter Savage Landor saluted "Mary Barton" and "Charlotte Bronte" as classics of the first water. On these two books alone her fame securely rests. But, in addition to these, she wrote many others, and we are compelled to greet her as one of the most diversified and one of the most brilliant writers of the notable age that she adorned.

F W Boreham

Image: Elizabeth Gaskell