Mrs Gaskell

I have just finished reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Wives and Daughters. It’s a long novel, so this portrait of a matronly Elizabeth has been my daily companion for quite a while.

Mrs Gaskell, as she was generally known, was a popular author during her lifetime (1810-1865), but then lost favour. I don’t think she was on the syllabus when I studied Eng Lit. Yet she is a wonderful writer, insightful, funny and with a keen social conscience and awareness of the dreadful poverty and degradation that resulted from the industrial revolution in England. She saw it first hand in Manchester, where her husband was a Unitarian Minister.

Elizabeth died suddenly at the age of 55, leaving Wives and Daughters unfinished. At the end of the novel as we have it, the young lovers Roger and Molly are tragically separated. He must return to his scientific research in Africa, and she can’t even bid him farewell because there is an outbreak of scarlet fever and she is in isolation. Sounds familiar? It is the more poignant because Elizabeth’s only son died from scarlet fever at the age of 9 months.

In the BBC adaptation, Molly and Roger end up together in Africa, Molly attractively trouser-clad. It’s hard to imagine the Elizabeth of this portrait dressing her heroine in anything so daring. Indeed, you wonder how a woman burdened with all those heavy layers could have engaged in the busy social life and charitable endeavours that we know Elizabeth did.

As the extra shows, though, she hadn’t always been so matronly.