Abstract
Gaskell’s narrative architecture—the way in which her tales are structured and the themes are deployed—challenges the potential constraints of the short story and reveals her skill as a writer of rich, nuanced texts, full of digressive detail and sophisticated play with narrative structure. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Gaskell deployed these techniques in the very different format of the short story with its specific authorial challenges, and the extent to which she was influenced by older traditions, namely oral tales and the tales of the French conteuses. The length of Gaskell’s short stories, as was not uncommon in the period, varies greatly, but even the apparently simplest and shortest of her texts reveals a depth of telling detail and a confident manipulation of character and temporality that is a common feature of her portfolio as a whole. I begin by examining Gaskell’s use of narrative time and the ways in which she manipulates this to suggest both temporal fragility and the links between time and inevitable change. I move on to discuss ‘narrative ghosts’, characters who are often female, sometimes apparently marginalised or powerless, but who nevertheless shape the narrative through their intangible presence. I follow this with a discussion of frame stories and interpolated stories that form an important aspect of Gaskell’s narrative technique. Frame stories have a long literary history, but I focus here on the sources that appear to have influenced Gaskell, and the ways in which these stories were used as a narrative technique in nineteenth-century shorter tales. Finally, I examine interpolated stories, a well-established literary technique in novels as well as in short stories of the nineteenth century. Using a diversity of narrative voices and structures enabled writers to expand the boundaries of their shorter stories, overcoming the restrictions of their allocated space within the journal. For women writers in particular, this could also represent a means of overcoming the gendered boundaries that constricted both their fictional and actual narratives of the female experience. I focus on ‘My Lady Ludlow’, analysing this as a form of domestic memoir mirroring, in fictional form, the factual, real-life solutions found by Victorian women who, in writing their life stories, had to manage the controversial divide between the public and the private.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See, for example, discussions by Jan B. Gordon and Carol A. Senf on the Brontë sisters’ use of interpolated texts and stories and narrative time.
- 2.
Harriet Martineau, known to both Gaskell and Howitt, also contributed to Sartain’s. Although the article is attributed to the author of Mary Barton, it is interesting to note that ‘Hand and Heart’, which was published simultaneously in the Sunday School Penny Magazine was attributed to Mrs Gaskell.
- 3.
See, for example, Sara Mills, 115–116.
- 4.
For a brief account of Caroline and George Norton’s marriage and the reforms it led to, see Lambert and Shaw, 3–5.
- 5.
See Elizabeth Gaskell to Lady Hatherton, December 27, 1853 in Further Letters, 105.
- 6.
See Lambert (2013), for an analysis of Molly Gibson’s meeting with Preston which makes similar use of the natural environment.
- 7.
See Lambert (2013), for a further discussion of this passage.
- 8.
Round the Sofa comprises the following tales: ‘My Lady Ludlow’ (1858), discussed in more detail in this chapter, ‘An Accursed Race’ (1855), discussed in more detail in Chap. 4, ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ (1858) also discussed in Chap. 4, ‘Half a Life-Time Ago’ (1855), ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856) discussed in more detail in Chap. 2, and ‘The Half-Brothers’ (1856). ‘Half a Life-Time Ago’ describes the life of Susan Dixon who owns and manages a small-holding in an isolated part of Westmoreland. She cares for her brother who is left mentally disabled following a serious illness, having been forced to choose between her fiancé and her brother. The story ends with Susan also giving home to the woman her fiancé goes on to marry and their children. ‘The Half-Brothers ’ describes the remarriage of the narrator’s mother and of her second husband’s jealousy and resentment of Gregory, the son of her first marriage. His attitude towards Gregory is shared by the narrator until Gregory saves his life when he becomes lost on the moors.
- 9.
Larry Uffleman discusses the frame story of Round the Sofa and its impact on the stories that follow, arguing that it presents a linear view of history within a circular fame story. He argues that publication in volume form, rather than in the extended time period of a journal, helped to unify ‘My Lady Ludlow’ in particular.
- 10.
Frances Trollope held her own version of Enlightenment salons , for example, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. See Lambert (2020: 77–78). Trollope would have considered her ‘At Homes’ as an important opportunity to educate young women, a later version of Enlightenment salons where, as Ruth Watts notes, ‘cultivated, virtuous women who could converse well were perceived by some as essential to the civilising of urban and urbane society and the increase of cultured knowledge’ (Watts 2008: 517).
- 11.
Joanne Wilkes notes that Christian Johnstone’s ‘Blanche Delamere’, published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, January–September 1839, prefigures ‘My Lady Ludlow’ in its interest in women landholders and challenges to traditional practices as well as in the complexity of its plot (76–77).
- 12.
See Lambert (2013: 38–39, 74–76 and 90–91) for a further discussion of the ways in which reform is brought to Hanbury Hall.
- 13.
See Lambert (2013: 24–25) for a further discussion of this letter and others in ‘My Lady Ludlow’ and pp. 17–28 for a further discussion of the use of letters in Gaskell’s fiction.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Published Primary Sources
Chapple, J A V and Shelston, Alan eds. Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Volume 1: Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings. Shattock, Joanne, ed. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Volume 2: Novellas and Shorter Fiction 1. Shelston, Alan, ed. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Volume 3: Novellas and Shorter Fiction 1I. Mitchell, Charlotte, ed. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1908.
Secondary Sources
Published Secondary Sources
Billington, Josie. ‘Gaskell’s “Rooted” Prose Realism’, in Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris and Sarine Gruver Moore eds. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 159–171.
Bourne Taylor, Jenny. ‘Short Fiction and the Novel’ in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880. Kucich, John and Bourne Taylor, Jenny eds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 239–255.
Frawley, Maria H., 1994. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.
Gordon, Jan, B. ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’, in ELH, Vol 51, No 4 (Winter, 1984), pp 719–745.
Hughes, Linda K and Lund, Michael eds. Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Krueger, Christine L. ‘The “female paternalist” as historian: Elizabeth Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, history, and the politics of gender. Linda M Shires ed. Routledge: New York and London, 1992, pp 166–183.
Krueger, Kate. British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Lambert, Carolyn. The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2013.
Lambert, Carolyn and Shaw, Marion eds. For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
Lambert, Carolyn. Frances Trollope. Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2020.
Mackay, Carol H. ‘Life-Writing’ in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, Linda H. Peterson, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 159–174.
Martin, Carol A. ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truths in Disguise’. Studies in the Novel. Vol 21, No 1 (Spring 1989), pp 27–40.
Matus, Jill. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Mills, Sara, 1991. Discourses of Difference: An analysis of women’s travel writing and colonialism. New York: Routledge.
Moore, Tara. Victorian Christmas in Print. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Peterson, Linda. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Richardson, Sarah. ‘“Well-Neighboured Houses”: the Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780–1860’, in The Power of the Petticoat, Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds.) London: Macmillan Press Ltd, pp. 56–73, 2000.
Senf, Carol A. ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Narrative Silences and Questions of Gender’ in College English, Vol 52, No 4, Women and Writing (April, 1990), pp 446–456.
Shattock, Joanne. ‘Becoming a Professional Writer’ in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing. Linda Peterson, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Shaw, Marion. ‘Sylvia’s Lovers and other historical fiction’ in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, Jill Matus, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp 75–89.
Uffleman, Larry K. ‘From serial to novel: Elizabeth Gaskell assembles Round the Sofa’. The Gaskell Society Journal, Volume 15, 2001, pp 30–37.
Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2013.
Wanning Harries, Elizabeth. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Watts, Ruth. ‘A Gendered Journey: Travel of Ideas in England c. 1750–1800’, History of Education, 37: 4, pp. 513–530, 2008.
Wilkes, Joanne. ‘Confronting the 1840s: Christian Johnstone in Criticism and Fiction’ in British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. Adrienne E Gavin and Carolyn W de la L Oulton eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Wolfreys, Julian. Being English: Narratives, Idioms and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lambert, C. (2021). Narrative Architecture. In: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Smaller Stories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79705-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79705-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79704-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79705-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)