"Elizabeth Gaskell" by Jenny Uglow

A biography of the Victorian novelist and biographer whose work includes Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851 - 3), North and South (1853 - 4), and The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857).

It's a hugely detailed biography. You learn a lot about her family (and it sometimes strays into side anecdotes about her connections) and an exhausting amount about the holidays she went on repeatedly (her husband's congregation "muttered that the minister’s wife took an uncommon number of holidays”; Ch 26) usually abroad with her kids but without her husband; he often went on solitary walking tours as soon as she returned). Each of the novels is also carefully described and the links between her life and the plot demonstrated. As a scholarly tome it is therefore a magnificent resource ... but I found it rather too detail-heavy to be an enjoyable read. Nevertheless, I shall hang onto it and as I read her novels I shall refer to it; I am sure that for this it shall prove useful.

Selected quotes:

• “One thing is pretty clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life.” (Ch 2)
• “Everyone has a multiple life to some degree and each self has its own story, the narratives flowing together, separate yet overlapping, like threads in a weave. Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and writing were such a woven cloth, the surface highly patterned and brightly coloured, but the web on the underside darker, subdued and tangled." (Ch 5)
• “From the beginning Gaskell’s stance was both radical and feminist, and she continued all her life to make use of these Gothic conventions to link the cruel repression of wives and daughters to the pressure of history and the patriarchal power of the aristocracy, in contrast to the tenderness of women” (Ch 6)
• “Gaskell believed that much of the harshness of society could be overcome if men would only free the feminine side of their nature.” (Ch 6)
• “Again and again she shows characters progressing from guilt, misery or self-obsession, through love (or sympathetic identification with another) to positive involvement with the whole community.” (Ch 7)
• “Within her fiction lies are a major cause of psychic crises. Often these untruths are not wilful inventions, but ‘white lies’ forced on people to cover up the truth” (Ch 12)
• “The early stages establish the milieu, the characters and their way of life until at some central point narrative itself takes over. From that point on ‘truth’ is displayed not in realism or analysis but in the symbolic workings of the plot.” (Ch 12)
• “Gaskell refuses to accept that the common is necessarily commonplace.” (Ch 24)
• “She could be stubborn, prejudiced, overwhelming and erratic, but people forgave her because she was so clearly involved.” (Ch 28)

October 2025

First published in 2010

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God