Having stopped myself over-indulging in Gaskell fiction, it wasn't quite enough so I've allowed myself a little indulge in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell where I eagerly set upon an essay by Audrey Jaffe comparing Cranford with Ruth.
If
I love Oxford World's Classics then I should maintain a healthy varsity
balance with the Cambridge Companions which have been faithful friends
down the years too. If I'm set fast upon reading one author I head straight here to see if I can have a Cambridge Companion for the journey. So often books like this can be like reading double dutch (with apologies to all visitors from the Netherlands), literary tomes not meant for us mere mortals, so to find a series that presents readable and accessible commentaries
and essays on a huge range of authors is a treat.It is these I often look to for
some in depth reading if I want it. Enough in one volume to save you finding a dozen others.
So my thoughts on Elizabeth Gaskell the person are confirmed,
" a writer for whom generations of readers.critics and scholars have felt an undisguised tenderness..an unfeigned capacity for spontaneity, for sympathy and for pleasure endeared her to her contemporaries"
More thoughts on Cranford on Sunday which is National Cranford Day here in the UK, but they are plumped up nicely with the notion that the characters are detached from cultural conventions of economic and social subservience to men and to now view the book as slightly more than a humourous little read based on trivial feminine concerns. Seeing the wider picture may not be to everyone's liking or need and that's perfectly fine, but I do like to get my moneysworth out of any book I take the time to read. If Mrs Gaskell sought to explore the issues surrounding progress and change and the fact that census returns showed the women outnumbering the men by a hefty margin, and then attempted to create a fictional community dominated by women to see what would happen, then I'm all for knowing that and much more. I shall be watching carefully to see how the men are portrayed in this TV series because as Jaffe argues,
"Although it is staunchly on the record as wishing to exclude men...Cranford is both fascinated by them and unable to function without them."
I'm inspired to pick Ruth up again having read this comparitive study and nor to date, in the entire book, have I come across any reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak which quite gladdens my heart because the mere mention and I get those palpitations that tell me I'm out of my depth.
When I return to Mary Barton and North and South there is a great essay on Elizabeth Gaskell's two Manchester novels by Jill Matus to help me through. An excellent piece on Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Linda H.Peterson and when I finally allow myself to pick up Sylvia's Lovers, a fascinating look at the novel in the context of historical fiction by Marion Shaw. Plenty more and all guaranteed to expand my knowledge base about a woman described as "a dove in the public sphere".
David Cecil famously compared Elizabeth Gaskell favourably with her contemporaries George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte who he felt were "not ordinary women" in fact he described them in 1934 as
" ugly, dynamic, childless, independent, contemptuous...in the placid dovecotes of Victorian womanhood 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."
Ah, bless. Elizabeth can come to visit this dovecote any time she likes.
I have used many of the Cambridge Companions down the years and keep a regular eye out for new ones, Margaret Atwood was mine the day it was published and Virginia Woolf and George Eliot are well thumbed and copiously underlined and annotated. For anyone out there like me, with little access to university libraries, but still with that lifelong learning itch, these books make the perfect emollient. If you fancy a bout of readily obtainable and informed background reading then look no further. Also some more Cambridge University Press titles coming soon, I'm on a mission to kidnap some of these off the degree and MA reading lists and into the domain of the ordinary reader, I've been missing some great books and I think you might enjoy them too.
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