We are intent on beautiful shawls and clothes, a coming extravaganza of a wedding, and subtle controlling codes of manners. Gaskell first creates lovingly the atmosphere of a sheltered home in an elegant London, where Margaret Hale, our heroine, her sleeping beauty rich cousin, Edith, and the shallow Aunt Shaw, and most of the women around them (it’s a household of women) seem ignorant of the hard realities of life - like the need to make or have access to money to support yourself.
For example, it opens unexpectedly for a condition of England novel, partly based on the Preston cotton strike and the locks-out. To begin with, the book often takes unexpected turns. This blog is a series of notes towards such chapters. Paradoxically since North and South is a book that is doing so many different things and has a wide range of topics or subject matters, often but not always from the perspective of someone questioning authority, it’s the kind of book that you need a book to write about adequately.
The result of this immersion: I feel I got closer to Gaskell than I ever did before. I read Felicia Bonaparte’s half-mad biography too - the more I read Gaskell, the more I came to agree with her, to the point that I agreed Molly had in effect killed herself when she decided to follow Roger’s advice and accept and subdue herself to her new stepmother. As with Fielding’s Tom Jones the fall before I also assigned some good essays which I’d never read before either, as we went along.
I wish there were a good one available for the Life of Charlotte Bronte. I listened to brilliant readings aloud on CD of Cranford, Mary Barton (Juliet Stevenson for Cover-to-cover), North and South itself (Clare Wille for Naxos) and Wives and Daughters. This past spring I taught a course I called “Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South in context.” Although I had spent over a year with a group of friends reading Gaskell’s short stories and a couple of novellas together on Women Writers through the Ages Yahoo, and had before read and responded intensely to Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters, I’d never really studied a Gaskell text the way I do when I teach it, and experience (as I do at the OLLIs at Mason and AU) true dialogue in a class room give-and-take. Yet men set me down in their fool’s books as a wise man, an independent character, strong-minded and all that cant - Mr Bell, North and South Margaret (Daniela Denby- Ashby) first making friends with Nicholas (Brendan Coyle) and Bessy Higgins (Anna Maxwell Martin) (Sandy Welch’s 2004 North and South, Part 2)
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