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Reviewed by:
  • Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life
  • Carol A. Martin (bio)
Shirley Foster , Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. viii+202, $49.95 cloth.

In this excellent, concise study, Shirley Foster traces the route and the roots of Elizabeth Gaskell's extensive and varied literary production. [End Page 426] Noting a family tradition of reading, Foster touches lightly on the early periodical authorship of William Stevenson, Gaskell's father, quoting Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick, in Mrs. Gaskell: Homes, Haunts and Stories (1913), who suggested that "her father was responsible for her love of historical research." Foster also describes the readers on her mother's side, the Holland family, with whom Gaskell spent most of her childhood, and concludes that her youthful reading of "'the old books' taught her the value of good writing, while her consumption of fiction may have stimulated her own imaginative tendencies" (17). This reading tradition stemming from "the solid intellectual background of her family on both sides" (13) was strengthened by formal education that was at least somewhat better than that usually available to girls.

Foster uses the records of Manchester's Portico Library (the focus of her 2000 Gaskell Society Journal article) as one of her primary sources in substantiating connections between Gaskell's reading and writing. Although the books were borrowed in William Gaskell's name because "Until the early twentieth century, women could not be members, and therefore Gaskell could not borrow books in her own right" ("We sit and read," 15), Foster demonstrates that his borrowings were often brought home for his wife. The records of the Portico, of which William Gaskell was Director from 1849 to 1884, are an important and previously underutilized source of information about Gaskell's life and work.

For instance, in preparing the Life of Charlotte Brontë, one of the challenges Gaskell faced was the absence of models for biographies by women and only limited ones about women (115). Writing in a genre new to her, Gaskell undoubtedly was the primary reader of William Gaskell's "Portico borrowings," in 1855–56, of the lives of Goethe, Johnson, Milton, Burns, and other male subjects: "Quite apart from authorship, the only female subjects in the list of borrowings are Lady Blessington, Hannah More and Lady Stanhope. In some ways, then, Gaskell was disadvantaged by having no suitable generic prototype to follow; in others, she was fortunate in that she had an open field before her" (116). Perhaps as a result, Gaskell struggled to imagine Charlotte Brontë in terms of prevailing attitudes about the primacy of women's domestic role. In addition, the difficulty in depicting "the unusual womanhood which [Brontë] represented" may have had an influence, Foster suggests, on Gaskell's future fiction in depicting other "young women struggling to reconcile duty and desire" (121).

The Portico records figure again to demonstrate what Jenny Uglow noted in Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1993): Gaskell's concern with accuracy in Sylvia's Lovers. Uglow describes Gaskell's attention to dialect forms appropriate to her characters (Uglow 513–14). Foster extends the historical grounding by examining Gaskell's reading on [End Page 427] Whitby, impressment, and the whaling industry in the 1790s. But the "specific historical and regional authenticity" of Sylvia's Lovers did not make it "a 'period piece,'" Foster argues. Rather, "The setting in a period where lawlessness is part of the hegemonic structures enables a wider exploration of the relation between social constraint and individual freedom" (158), as well as of the power dynamics of a male-dominated society (158–59).

As the title suggests, Foster's study incorporates personal details only as they pertain directly to Gaskell's work. Besides the Portico Library records, another new source of information that informs Foster's work is Further Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (2000). The majority of these letters date from the most productive period of her "literary life," her last 15 years.

While Foster's analyses of the long, better known works are insightful, her substantial discussion of the shorter works, usually published in periodicals, is of particular interest for VPR readers. In Chapter 5, she notes that many of the...

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