Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

The question of how to name this author is one which continues to exercise editors and critics of her work. The marked tendency in recent decades to drop ‘Mrs Gaskell’ in favour of ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’ has acted as a welcome corrective to this writer’s grossly undeserved reputation as a married (i.e. ‘unserious’), provincial, and therefore minor novelist. Yet the use of the name has survived into the twenty-first century, most notably in Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester University Press, 2000, 2003) as the form, explain the editors (John Chapple and Alan Shelston), by which the writer would have expected to be addressed; while, on the other hand, the critic Christopher Ricks has recently suggested that the form she habitually used for signing off her letters, E. C. Gaskell, should be preferred over all others. This paper, looking chiefly at the fiction based in Manchester and Cheshire, will attempt fairly to assess the rival claims of these forms, while arguing that it is very difficult to separate the distinctive achievement of this writer’s work in the realist mode from the very rootedness, domestically and regionally, which has tended to deny her status as a great realist writer. I will argue that, in consequence, there is a strong case for continuing to respect ‘Mrs Gaskell’ as the chosen authorial name, much as editors and critics respect the name ‘George Eliot’, for instance. For the form of name in these instances, I suggest, signifies literary configurations and orientations which though not separate from, are arguably more useful to a just appreciation of these writers than, a concern for matters of social ideology.

Dr Josie Billington is the author of Faithful Realism (2002) – a study of Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy, and have published various chapters, articles and essays on Gaskell. She is currently editing her Wives and Daughters for the new complete edition of Gaskell’s works (Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming 2005-6). She is Honorary Fellow in the English Department, University of Liverpool, P.O. Box 147, L69 3BX jbilling@liv.ac.uk