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  GOTHIC TALES

  ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester. For the first sixteen years of her marriage, she combined the activities of motherhood, the management of a busy household and parish work in an area notorious for its poverty and appalling living conditions. She also travelled and started to write. Mary Barton, her first full-length fiction, published in 1848 and set in industrial Manchester, was an instant success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years; her most notable work being another novel of Manchester industrial life, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend until the latter's death in 1855. Soon after this, Gaskell was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a carefully researched and sympathetic account of this probing and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Gaskell's position as a minister's wife and as a successful writer gave her a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and the larger literary world. She was a committed and uncompromising artist, as Dickens discovered when, as editor of Household Words, he unsuccessfully tried to impose his views on her. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866), are usually considered to be her finest, revealing developments in narrative technique and subtleties of character portrayal. Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865 at Alton, Hampshire, in the house that she had bought with her literary eatnings.

  LAURA KRANZLER received her D.Phil. on Gothic Fiction from Hertford College, Oxford. She has written articles on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the literary theory of Virginia Woolf, and is the author of two novels.

  ELIZABETH GASKELL

  Gothic Tales

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  LAURA KRANZLER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in Penguin Classics 2000

  Reprinted 2004

  5

  Introduction and Notes copyright © Laura Kranzler, 2000

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

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  CONTENTS

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION

  FURTHER READING

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  Disappearances

  The Old Nurse's Story

  The Squire's Story

  The Poor Clare

  The Doom of the Griffiths

  Lois the Witch

  The Crooked Branch

  Curious, if True

  The Grey Woman

  APPENDIX

  NOTES

  CHRONOLOGY

  1810

  29 September: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson born to William and Elizabeth Stevenson in Chelsea

  1811

  October: Mother, Elizabeth Stevenson, dies; Elizabeth moves to Knutsford, Cheshire, to live with her mother’s sister Hannah Lumb

  1814

  William Stevenson marries Catherine Thomson

  1821–6

  Elizabeth attends Byerley sisters’ boarding school (school near Warwick, but moves to Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1824)

  1822

  Brother, John Stevenson (b. 1799), joins Merchant Navy

  1828

  John Stevenson disappears on a voyage to India; no definitive information about his fate

  1829

  March: William Stevenson dies

  Elizabeth stays with uncle in Park Lane, London and visits relations, the Turners, at Newcastle upon Tyne

  1831

  Visits Edinburgh with Ann Turner; has bust sculpted by David Dunbar, and her miniature painted by stepmother’s brother, William John Thomson; visits Ann Turner’s sister and brother-in-law, Unitarian minister John Robberds, in Manchester, where she meets Revd William Gaskell (1805–84)

  1832

  30 August: Elizabeth and William marry at St John’s Parish Church, Knutsford; they honeymoon in North Wales, and move to 14 Dover Street, Manchester

  1833

  10 July: Gives birth to stillborn daughter

  1834

  12 September: Gives birth to Marianne

  1835

  Starts My Diary for Marianne

  1837

  January: ‘Sketches Among the Poor’, No. I, written with William, in Blackwood’s Magazine

  7 February: Gives birth to Margaret Emily (Meta)

  1 May: Hannah Lumb dies

  1840

  ‘Clopton Hall’ in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places

  1841

  July: Gaskells visit Heidelberg

  1842

  7 October: Gives birth to Florence Elizabeth

  Family moves to 121 Upper Rumford Road, Manchester

  1844

  23 October: Gives birth to William

  1845

  10 August: William (son) dies of scarlet fever at Portmadoc, Wales, during family holiday

  1846

  3 September: Gives birth to Julia Bradford

  1848

  October: Mary Barton published anonymously; Elizabeth is paid £100 for the copyright by Chapman and Hall

  1849

  April-May: Visits London, meets Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle

  June-August: Visits the Lake District, meets William Wordsworth

  1850

  June: Family moves to 42 (later 84) Plymouth Grove, Manchester

  19 August: Meets Charlotte Brontë in Windermere

  1851

  June: ‘Disappearances’ in Household Words; visited by Charlotte Brontë

  July: Visits London and the Great Exhibition

  October: Visits Knutsford

  December-May 1853: Cranford in nine instalments in Household Words

  1852

  December: ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words

  1853

  January: Ruth published

  April: Charlotte Brontë visits Manchester

  May: Visits Paris

  June: Cranford published

  September: Visits Charlotte Brontë at Haworth

  December: ‘The Squire’s Story’ in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words
>
  1854

  January: Visits Paris with Marianne, meets Madame Mohl September–January 1855: North and South in Household Words

  1855

  February: Visits Madame Mohl in Paris with Meta

  June: Asked to write a biography of Charlotte Brontë by

  Patrick Brontë North and South published

  September: Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales published

  1856

  1 January: Signs petition to amend the law on married women’s property

  May: Visits Brussels to conduct research on biography of Brontë

  December: ‘The Poor Clare’ in Household Words

  1857

  February–May: Visits Rome, where she meets Charles Norton March: The Life of Charlotte Brontë published, the first book to carry Elizabeth Gaskell’s name on the title-page; it was soon followed by a heavily altered third edition

  1858

  January: ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

  September-December: Visits Heidelberg with Meta and Florence, and visits the Mohls in Paris

  1859

  March: Round the Sofa and Other Tales published

  Summer: Visits Scotland

  October: ‘Lois the Witch’ in All the Year Round

  November: Visits Whitby, which provides the setting for Sylvia’s

  Lovers

  December: ‘The Crooked Branch’ published in the Extra

  Christmas Number of All the Year Round, as ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’

  1860

  February: ‘Curious, if True’ in Cornhill Magazine

  May: Right at Last and Other Tales published

  July-August: Visits Heidelberg

  1861

  January: ‘The Grey Woman’ in All the Year Round

  1862

  Visits Paris, Brittany and Normandy to conduct research for articles on French life

  1863

  February: Sylvia’s Lovers published; Elizabeth is paid £1,000 by Smith, Elder

  March-August: Visits France and Italy

  1864

  Cousin Phillis published

  August: Visits Switzerland

  August-January 1866: Wives and Daughters in Cornhill Magazine

  1865

  March-April: Visits Paris

  June: Buys The Lawn, Holybourne, Hampshire, as a surprise for William

  October: Visits Dieppe; The Grey Woman and Other Tales published

  12 November: Dies at Holybourne

  16 November: Buried at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford

  Cousin Phillis, and Other Tales published

  1866

  February: Wives and Daughters: An Every-day Story published (Elizabeth died without quite completing it)

  INTRODUCTION

  (Readers are advised that this Introduction makes some of the plots explicit.)

  In a letter to Eliza ‘Tottie’ Fox dated 29 May 1849, Elizabeth Gaskell triumphantly proclaims, ‘I SAW a ghost! Yes I did; though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St I should not wonder if you are sceptical.’1 This juxtaposition of the ghastly and the everyday suggests one of the defining characteristics of the Gothic genre, that of the uncanny double, the shadowy world that is the complex underbelly of familiar experience. Gaskell can be seen to exploit the idea of mirror opposites in the very form of her fiction; it could be suggested that her pleasurably eerie short stories and novellas collected here represent the darkly surreal depths of her more overtly political and realistic novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855).2 Gaskell’s interest in ghosts and Gothic fiction is well documented.3 One of her first pieces of published work was ‘Clopton Hall’, a reworking of an atmospheric essay she had written while at Avonbank School in Stratford-upon-Avon, published in 1840 by her friend William Howitt in his collection Visits to Remarkable Places.4 This short piece, like the stories collected here, indicates Gaskell’s playful exploration not just of the supernatural, but of other Gothic themes and motifs such as the doubled identity, the discovered manuscript, and the conflict with history and forms of authority. In Gaskell’s Gothic scenarios, it is usually the female characters who are victimized by the males, and it is this investment in exposing the conflict between the powerful and the powerless that links these stories and novellas most explicitly with the themes of her better-known full-length works. However, although Gaskell may be said to be most fully engaged in exposing social and political injustice, as the pieces collected here demonstrate, there is a marked tension between the categories of factual sources and fictionalized narratives, between stories which empower the self and stories which oppress the Other. Part of what constitutes the Gothic experience in these stories is the split between different forms of identity and between different forms of authority – in terms of gender, history and textuality – and how those boundaries are themselves transgressed. In Gaskell’s stories and novellas, what has been repressed continues to return, fact continually merges into fiction, and it is these shifts between what is real and what is imagined – seeing that ghost in the everyday street – that makes these stories so compelling.

  One of the fundamental contradictions inherent in these stories is, of course, the character of the writer herself. All of the pieces collected here, except for ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, were originally published anonymously, all but two in Charles Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round. Her first three stories, however – ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ (1847), ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ (1847) and ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ (1848) – first appeared in Howitt’s Journal and were published under the name ‘Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.’, a provocative and witty pseudonym.5 It links her commitment to contemporary Manchester industry (the cotton mill) with the New England clergyman, scholar and, most notoriously, witch-hunter. One of Cotton Mather’s most influential works was Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1685), and he himself makes a notable appearance in Gaskell’s story ‘Lois the Witch’, when he arrives in Salem to assist in the purging and judging of ‘witches’. Gaskell’s identity as writer under this name is thus a curious hybrid of Unitarian and Puritan, English and American, Victorian and seventeenth century, and crucially calls into question the relationship between fiction and history, female and male identities, and a sense of the comic within more serious concerns.

  In her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell explicitly refers to her ambivalence about the differences between the freedom with which men can pursue a career in writing, and the oppressive weight of responsibilities that interferes with the same pursuit for women:

  When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit… and another… steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she… must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others.6

  There is a melancholic realization here, it seems, in Gaskell’s recognition of the near-impossibility of compromise between women’s responsibilities to others and to themselves and their talents; whereas men, according to Gaskell, are virtually interchangeable in the world of work, and therefore can step out of it at will to pursue their own interests, women, it seems, are inevitably bound to their domestic and social obligations. How, then, can a woman reconcile these with the necessity that she find time to write, though this writing must still be in the ‘service of others’?

  In a letter to Eliza Fox written in 1850, Gaskell stresses the point that ‘Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount.’7 She
then goes on to stress in the same letter the need for a ‘refuge of the hidden world of Art’, which women can ‘shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares’. In fact, she argues that the ‘blending’ of ‘Home duties and the development of the Individual’ is necessary for the ‘healthy’ maintenance of women’s commitment to both spheres although, as she sadly concludes, ‘it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other’. In fact, Jenny Uglow suggests that one reason why Gaskell might have chosen to write short pieces for magazines is that she could sneak such work in between completing her commitments to the ‘peddling’ work within the domestic sphere.8 What is so interesting, of course, is that the fiction she wrote, especially ‘Lois the Witch’, ‘The Grey Woman’, ‘The Poor Clare’ and ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, suggests that this domestic arena which Gaskell is so keen to preserve and prioritize is also precisely the place where women are at their must vulnerable and in most danger.