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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell
  • Rohan Maitzen (bio)
Jill L. Matus, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge University Press. xxii, 212. US $30.95

Not long ago, the superb British magazine The Reader (spring 2005) featured an essay by Josie Billington on the question ‘Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today?’ Billington closes with a lament that Gaskell ‘remains so subject to the modern habit of categorisation (ghettoised as a “social-problem novelist” or considered of interest only to women’s studies).’ The excellent Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell should give Billington cause for celebration: it testifies to the range of current academic approaches to Gaskell’s work, and Susan Hamilton’s concluding chapter also highlights the surge in popular interest, both demonstrated and fed by the activities of the Gaskell Society and recent bbc adaptations of her fiction. Clearly many people are, in fact, reading Gaskell today, and for many reasons.

Gaskell’s low critical standing early in the last century stems, as Hamilton and other contributors emphasize, from the legacy of nineteenth-century critics who (to use a dichotomy Gaskell herself made famous in her biography of Charlotte Brontë) could not see the writer for the woman. Beloved then as now for her ‘warm humanity and genial affections,’ Gaskell has only recently been acknowledged as ‘an author of works richly ambivalent, transgressive, and formally sophisticated.’ The influence of Marxist and feminist criticism and, more recently, the rise of cultural studies moved Gaskell criticism beyond the ‘narrowly formalist practice’ that had perpetuated her marginalization. [End Page 309]

All of the essays in the Cambridge Companion in their own ways reflect the emphasis on social, cultural, and political contexts predicted by this critical genealogy. In a short space it is not possible to give detailed attention to them all. Jill Matus’s introduction helpfully sets up many of the biographical, critical, and thematic cruxes on which the rest of the volume will turn, and Deirdre D’Albertis gives an illuminating account of Gaskell’s ‘life and letters.’ Five chapters are then organized around Gaskell’s major works; one focuses on her short stories and non-fiction; three further essays are thematically organized. Hamilton’s meta-critical reflections provide a fitting conclusion. The quality of both analysis and writing is uniformly high. At the same time, the collection highlights the challenge of addressing both students and scholars. The former –or just inquiring general readers – will find much of help and interest here, from the thorough chronology to John Chapple’s detailed account of ‘Unitarian dissent.’ They may be less well served by Jill Matus’s decision, in her chapter on Mary Barton and North and South, to turn from the obvious topic of ‘their representation of industrial life, and their purchase on the relations of works and masters, labor and capital’ to ‘emotional and psychic states.’ Yet Matus’s novel approach enriches the volume’s value for the specialist. Conversely, Marion Shaw’s chapter on Sylvia’s Lovers nicely articulates the historiographical elements of Gaskell’s fiction, but the importance of ‘typical’ characters in the historical novel after Scott or the insight that ‘history lies around us in the litter of everyday life’ is well-travelled territory for scholars in this area, and even Shaw’s notes would not point them in any new critical directions. Such tension between the introductory and the expert seems a predictable result in a series of this kind.

A different kind of tension exists between the authors’ resistance to the ‘gendered terms of appraisal’ that cast Gaskell as charming, feminine, and domestic – and thus not deserving of critical attention – and their implicit agreement that these qualities are not hallmarks of literary significance. This volume, we’re told, presents ‘a more diverse and complex Gaskell than was previously acknowledged.’ ‘Gaskell’s idylls,’ Linda Hughes points out, ‘have been increasingly repositioned as highly complex, multivalent narratives’; Shirley Foster calls attention to ‘the generic transgressiveness of much of Gaskell’s work’; Patsy Stoneman argues that, while Gaskell ‘is not an obvious feminist,’ we can find in her novels ‘a thorough critique’ of specific forms of ‘masculine autonomy.’ This revisionist view of Gaskell is convincing, but...

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