Elizabeth Gaskell

 How have I never read Elizabeth Gaskell? 

Is that some part of education that you miss out on if you’re not posh? You know, how Boris is always banging on about Virgil and Gove is obsessed with Henry James. The posh rulers of our country tend to enjoy their literature to be about a dim distant past. None of them get excited about the new James Pattison or Jojo Moyes, although Nicola Sturgeon does read everything.

I’ve stumbled upon Elizabeth Gaskell books as I try to get into the head of the women of 1882. I just discovered that my Emily did work for a little while after William left her, at Courtaulds as a silk winder in the factory that then became the Marconi building in Chelmsford. I wanted to know what that life was like and so found Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell.

 I know. She’s not really my Emily. She’s just a random woman who was briefly in the workhouse and committed a crime that saw her spend a couple of nights at the Moot Hall but she is mine. I’m passionate about understanding her. I’m equally disgusted with her and protective towards her. She could be my own daughter. I’ll forgive her anything because I love her but I can’t understand what she did. Emily’s own mother is equally a puzzle and her Aunts seem like amazing women. 

It is too easy, however, to think you know how they were thinking. You assume that they think like you. Maybe they do but maybe life was so different then that you can’t assume anything. History tends to write women out.

“Oh, of course,” people say to me, “A woman couldn’t live as a single mother without a man, the shame would have been too much.”

But, the censuses show plenty of women living with their children, as the head of the household, or living as unmarried mothers with their parents. I wanted to read women who were writing at the time. The Brontes give you an idea of the very wealthy but was anyone writing about women who made their own way in the world? 

It seems that person was Mrs Gaskell. She wrote Charlotte’s biography and wrote her novel Ruth after contacting Dickens to find out how she could help a woman that she had visited in prison. She wrote Cranford, which I remember being on TV and being a story  about frivolous, gossiping women, who really controlled the town, despite what the men thought. 

Thank goodness that I don’t have eleven Christmas concerts to organise this year. I have a lot of catch up reading to do. 

Mrs Gaskell, at 50, having a kip while reading the latest Henry James?