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In March 1856, a petition was presented in the British Parliament, by Lord Brougham in the Upper House and by Sir Erskine Perry in the Commons. The petition called for property rights for married women, but what is striking is that it was submitted by, and rapidly became associated very closely with, female literary writers. This chapter examines how women writers in Victorian England negotiated the inheritance of a highly gendered model of creativity and intellectual property, focusing on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Unlike William Thackeray and Charles Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot were not publicly involved with the debate about authorship in the 1850s, or with the campaign to improve copyright protection.

This chapter illustrates Elizabeth Gaskell's originality and success, and shows how she used her understanding of literary tradition to articulate and develop her new female point of view on the new urban poverty caused by industrialization. Her consciousness of isolation in her task led her to draw on both earlier and contemporary writers for support and motivated her to provide her successors and contemporaries with models and encouragement. As the chapter shows, Mary Barton emerged from Gaskell's wide reading, her habit of regular writing, with a Unitarian sense of duty and the obligation to tell the truth. It was also motivated by the hope of distracting herself from the personal tragedy of her baby son Willie's death in 1845. At the same time, Gaskell made tradition part of the subject matter of her novel when she showed Mary Barton throwing off the expectations about female behavior which had constrained her and when she dramatized John Carson's religious obligation to forgive John Barton.

Historical research reveals the typical Victorian woman as a mental and moral cripple; incapable of informed and independent judgement; timid; deferential; vacuous; and as a slave to conventional opinion, to class prejudice, and to a narrow and bigoted morality. Clearly, a Victorian woman writer was not a ‘typical’ Victorian woman, and Elizabeth Gaskell's letters give a delightful sense of her lively and energetic life-style. Although her letters seem to show Gaskell as an anomaly, ‘almost too vivid and aware for her circle’, it is misleading to see all Victorian women as ‘shackled by a cramping and inflexible domestic ideology’. Female friendship was an important counterweight to domesticity, but very few, even of the avowed feminists of the period, wanted to remove women from the home. As early as 1838, we find Gaskell conscious of tension between home duties and a longing for freedom. She never openly speaks of sexuality and desire. This chapter explores Gaskell as a ‘relative creature’ – defined by her status as daughter, wife and mother – and highlights the enriching rather than the cramping aspects of these roles.

The society in which Elizabeth Gaskell lived and wrote was intersected horizontally by class, and vertically by gender divisions. Critics have created a divided image of her work by focusing on one or other of these axes – ‘industrial’ or ‘domestic’. This chapter begins by drawing examples from Gaskell's lesser-known fiction, in which the issues are often very clear, but which critics have less completely labelled and categorised. What emerges from her work as a whole is that, at subsistence level, gender divisions are blurred; women exercise responsibility; men give basic nurturance. In the middle class, ideology heightens differentiation, producing infantilised women and authoritarian men. Gaskell's work as a whole highlights working women – not just factory workers but seamstresses, milliners, washerwomen, ‘chars’, a tailor, beekeepers, farmers, housewives and domestic servants. By stressing women's common need for economic self-sufficiency, supportive friendships and maternal roles, Gaskell's novels blur distinctions between classes and between married and unmarried women. The parental imperative is at the basis of Gaskell's unorthodox treatment of gender roles.

Some Victorian women's novels, such as Jane Eyre, have been a major inspiration to the current women's movement. Others, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's, have been seen as irrelevant or even counterproductive. While Charlotte Brontë has attracted a mass of new feminist readings, Gaskell remains a respectable minor Victorian, colonised up to a point by Marxists, but almost ignored by feminists. Her work offers neither an explicit critique of women's oppression nor fictive situations. Gaskell's novels appear to present ‘women's lot’ either as material for social comedy, as in Cranford, or as incidental to class struggle, as in Mary Barton, and thus hardly to be ‘about’ women at all. Of all the enormous output of feminist literary criticism during the last fifteen years, none has been concerned to any major extent with Gaskell. This chapter begins with Lord David Cecil's vision of ‘Mrs Gaskell’ as the ‘little woman’, and then examines phallic criticism, the text as female history, ideology and the literary text, psychoanalysis and feminist criticism, Marxism, feminism and the question of motherhood.

Between Mary Barton and Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell has shifted from public to private themes, from fatherhood to motherhood, and from a self-conscious use of Romantic or Biblical allusion to the language of family life. The change has been interpreted as her giving up the struggle for social reform, and becoming, in late middle age, gracefully ‘feminine’ and conformist. On the contrary, this book has shown that each of the earlier novels ‘tripped’ on the unfocused ‘woman question’, which in Wives and Daughters becomes the acknowledged subject of debate. The problematic status of Wives and Daughters as a ‘great’ novel, with nothing to account for its ‘greatness’ – no dramatic events, ‘major’ themes or revolutionary conclusions – is related to the minuteness of its effects, dictated by the small scale of women's daily lives, but also by the theories of realism.

This chapter argues that gender and genre shape reputations of women writers according to different settings of their homes and well-known works. A contemporary of Irving and mentor of the Howitts, Mary Russell Mitford wrote topographical memoirs of her village and became a local personality for pilgrimage, as illustrated by a tour of Three Mile Cross in the twenty-first century. Mitford’s gendered representation (caricatured as plump spinster with dogs and flowers, in portraits, prose) contrasts with other women writers, including Mrs Hall. In view of Woolf’s feminist literary history, Mitford’s rural domesticity forms a counterpart to the village sketches of Elizabeth Gaskell (a first-person narrative of visits to Gaskell sites), who in turn shaped literary biography and tourism to Haworth. The concluding section of the chapter illustrates the classic Brontë Country through published “little journeys” around 1900 and a brief narrative of the experience today.

Chapter 7, ‘Biopolitics of Seriality’ considers the political possibilities that were released or inaugurated in the 1840s by this structure of seriality. It takes the whole run of Howitt’s Journal as its ‘serial’ case study and uses this liberal journal to think about how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics. Through its serial repetition of exemplary narratives of injustice around gender, race, class and age, Howitt’s Journal unconsciously reveals the profound connection between these constructs. Tracking the representation of children, slaves and the Irish across the run of the journal, partly through its use of work by Elizabeth Gaskell and Frederick Douglass, this chapter suggests that we need to develop a more complex way of thinking about the developing relationship between kinship, citizenship, and biopolitics at this critical historical moment.

Ardel Haefele-Thomas in Chapter 2 analyses Elizabeth Gaskell’s pioneering of alternative family ties in her short Gothic fictional texts. Gaskell utilizes the Gothic genre to explore and provide points of escape for women confined within abusive, heteronormative situations. From her understanding of the ways that gender, class and subversions of ‘normative’ heterosexual family structures can function together to create transgressive critiques and narratives, Gaskell finds a place to carry out queer family re-structurings within her Gothic short fiction. Haefele-Thomas explores contemporary queer theory focusing specifically on ideas of transgender and gender queer positionality as well as historic references to famous nineteenth-century cross-dressing cases that may have influenced Elizabeth Gaskell’s thinking about the topic.

In this essay, Catherine Delafield highlights the importance of the literary periodical and the practice of serial publication for the form and content of women’s novels. By revisiting the original periodical publishing contexts of two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854–5), first published in Household Words (1850–9), and Wives and Daughters (1864–6), first serialised in the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1970), Delafield demonstrates Gaskell’s incisive understanding of the publishing conventions of the serial novel, even if she struggled with the artistic limitations of that form. A careful comparison of the periodical and volume versions of the novels yields the conclusion that the ‘structure and style of her novels’ were ‘formed in response to their periodical contexts,’ with Gaskell shown to not only be a diligent student of the serial but also an innovator of that form (p.429). Gaskell’s prominent place within the genealogy of the Victorian serial was not entirely without friction, however. As Delafield demonstrates, she actively challenged the interventions of her male editors, including Charles Dickens (1812–70), though not always successfully. In this sense, Gaskell’s ‘habit of serialisation’ was flavoured with both ‘conformity and instruction,’ given her willingness to work within and push the boundaries of the artistic and material constraints of the serial form (p.440).

This chapter examines Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford as a representation of women's domestic handicraft and as a meditation on ephemerality during the Victorian period. It also considers how the novel tackles the confrontation between the new paper finance and the older craft paradigm. By focusing on craft, the chapter analyzes the status of Gaskell's collection of sketches and her anxieties about the novel which are reflected in Cranford's signature craft, the making of paper candlelighters.

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, Wives and Daughters (1865), is a critical anomaly. Only Coral Lansbury and Patricia Spacks see that the structure of families and the socialisation of girls is its central, and important, subject matter. The novel for the first time makes central what had earlier been an unacknowledged problem; the education of daughters by wives to be wives. It begins at the beginning, with ‘the old rigmarole of childhood’, and the first two chapters are full of references to fairytales. Just as many fairytales suggest rites of passage or initiation tests by which girls and boys become women and men, so Wives and Daughters begins with motherless Molly Gibson at the age of twelve. In spite of a certain relish for the ‘levelling’ effects of sexuality in Wives and Daughters, Gaskell was in no doubt that uninhibited sexuality was a danger rather than a freedom.

Like Mary Barton and Ruth, Sylvia's Lovers has its source in George Crabbe's tales of tragedy among the poor. Because the striking public events in Sylvia's Lovers seem incongruous in a ‘pastoral love-story’, they have been criticised, like many of the short stories of this period, as melodramatic. Sylvia's Lovers is not framed as a purely private story but deals explicitly with the interaction of public and private events. In particular, like North and South, it investigates the relation between aggression on a public scale and ideologies of masculinity as manifested in courtship and the family. The industrial novels traced working-class violence to frustrated parental love, and in Sylvia's Lovers, this process is ritually enacted. The novel is the third of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels to hinge around a lie, and each lie derives from a denial of female sexuality. It also appears to represent opposed ethics, but shows that each is motivated by self-interest, which is the ‘law of the market’ as well as the ‘law of the jungle’.

Most critics deplore the presence of ‘extraneous factors’ such as the love story and the murder plot in Mary Barton. Elizabeth Gaskell dissociated herself from ‘political economy’ because she believed that humane ethical attitudes, rather than blind market forces, should govern social relationships. Mary Barton develops a contrast between two ethical systems, that of the working class, based on caring and co-operation, and that of the middle class, based on ownership, authority and the law. The dichotomy is similar to the conventional gender-role division, and Gaskell has been criticised for trying to evade the question of class struggle with an inappropriate domestic ethic. She had, however, some justification for presenting the working class as observing a ‘female ethic’. Rather than evading the question of class struggle, however, Mary Barton offers a critique of confrontational politics. As a critique of fatherhood, Mary Barton needs its ‘irrelevant’ subplots.

Ruth, with its difficult focus on the ‘fallen woman’, has prompted most of its readers to protest in one way or another, and has never been a popular book. Knowing that she was stirring a hornets' nest, Elizabeth Gaskell was unusually anxious during its composition, and unusually sensitive to criticism. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, making her feel like ‘St Sebastian tied to a tree to be shot at with arrows’. Ruth is indeed a problematic novel, flawed by ‘fundamental contradictions’ that produce gaps, false leads and inconsistencies in the narrative surface. However, this chapter argues that these rifts and flaws are not simple (and uninteresting) failures of ‘artistic unity’, but significant failures of ideological coherence. The disruptive factor is female sexuality, which cannot be acknowledged in the ideological surface of the novel, but is repressed, emerging as a sub-text of imagery and dreams. Ruth is radical in Victorian terms in challenging the double standard that put all the blame for sexual transgressions onto the woman.

Few problems so plagued the industrializing city as fires. In the 1840s, on the uncertain ground of places like Manchester in England’s north, a diverse cohort of manufacturers, business agents, and writers struggled to deal with the challenges of prediction, valuation, and compensation that industrial fires uniquely raised. They comprise a broader discourse of risk management which includes insurance agents as well as novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell, whose novel Mary Barton defines accidents, liability, and compensation on its own terms. Although the Victorian novel would be denigrated for its ‘queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary’ (in Henry James’s words), Gaskell’s example reveals how the novel absorbs accidents as a practice of the genre, very much related to its cultural interventions.

Develops a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) that shifts the discussion of this industrial novel from waged to unwaged industry, from the masculinized factory floor to the feminized workplace of the home. Explores its warmly detailed portrayal of domestic labor in a Victorian working-class community—from preparing food and sewing curtains to caring for children, the sick, and the dying. Further considers the novel’s many amateurs: scientists, firefighters, sleuths, sick-nurses, and herbalists. Supplements Elaine Freedgood’s reading of the Bartons’ cotton curtains to highlight the female labor of sewing them and, beyond their decorative function, their assertion of a working-class right to privacy.