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

Most discussions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë focus on the parallels between the two novelists and the personal stake that Gaskell had in her construction of a fellow Victorian woman writer. Linda Hughes and Michael Lund suggest, for example, that the Life was “a form of benign self-advertisement” and that Gaskell’s presentation of “the brilliant but pure Brontë vouches for the worth of Gaskell’s own writing,” particularly at a moment in Gaskell’s career when she came under fire for the subject matter of Ruth (1853). Even skeptical or hostile analyses of the Life, such as those by Deirdre d’Albertis or Juliet Barker, acknowledge the parallels between the two women writers—their mutual interest in women, factory workers, and social reform in Mary Barton (1848) and Shirley (1849), their identification with “northern” themes such as manufacturing and industry versus “southern” concerns with agrarian or village life, and their embrace of a “parallel currents” model of authorship, which viewed the “woman” and the “author” as fulfilling two different, if important social roles.

While recognizing the continuities between the two writers, I want to re-consider the personal stake that Gaskell held in writing Brontë’s Life by beginning with some discontinuities between the two women, and propose another agenda in the Life of Charlotte Brontë: the creation of a community of women authors based in the north of England and operating in the triangle of Manchester, Haworth, and the Lake District. Gaskell must first negotiate the contrast between Haworth and Manchester that is prominent in the letters of Charlotte Brontë and that, as her primary source, she frequently quotes in the Life—the remoteness and wildness of the Yorkshire moors that “explains” the traces of “coarseness” in the Brontës’ novels and that must be overcome in order to incorporate Charlotte Brontë into a group of respectable women authors. Gaskell’s biography famously begins with a journey to the Haworth parsonage —away from a city, out through barren country, up the steep main street of Haworth to a isolated parsonage—that is in stark contrast to her own new home in Plymouth Grove, easily reached by train to Manchester yet deliciously away from the city’s black smoke. This contrast is overcome by a mutual domesticity (a prominent part of the Life, volume II) but also, I would argue, by a shared intellectual project: the representation of a recognizable community of women writers. Whereas d’Albertis sees Gaskell striking “a Faustian bargain” by using gendered domesticity ultimately “to dissociate herself from the other woman” (19), I see Gaskell as using the domestic space—including Harriet Martineau’s The Knoll, the Arnolds’ Fox How, and her own home at Plymouth Grove—as enacting a myth of association and thus bringing into being an important sorority of writers. (In Bourdieu’s terms, this is a move to establish “symbolic criteria of lasting value.”)

The creation of a community of women authors—a gendered version of Isaac D’Israeli’s conception of an international fraternity of authors joined by “genius” and rising above the common run of hacks —begins with volume II, chapter vii of the Life. This chapter includes “the biographer’s impressions of Miss Brontë” (“Contents”) and their first meeting in the Lake District—the home of Wordsworth, the Arnolds, and Harriet Martineau—in August, 1850. The chapter functions as an induction of Charlotte Brontë—and, implicitly, Elizabeth Gaskell, who had just published her first novel, Mary Barton—into the community of English authors. As Gaskell shapes it, the account focuses on intellectual exchange (discussion of Ruskin, Newman, Wordsworth, Tennyson), on a Wordsworthian appreciation of the natural scenery (evident in Brontë, if absent in the reformer Sir Kay-Suttleworth, who is their host), and on the inclusion of both Brontë and Gaskell in Martineau’s intimate circle at the Knoll.

What this account leaves unresolved is whether this is an induction into a community of professional women writers or whether Gaskell means to eschew the label ‘professional’ as a lesser status (in Bourdieu’s terms, applicable to the “sub-field of large-scale production” rather than a designation of high status). Martineau certainly saw herself in professional terms (as in the letter to her mother, published in her Autobiography, requesting that her mother to think of her as a “professional son”). But Gaskell is less willing than Martineau to present the professional aspects of her writerly relationships in the Life, and in subsequent chapters excludes portions of Brontës’ letters than report on publishers’ terms, contracts for mss., and other practical aspects of a mid-century authorship. I mean to puzzle over this dilemma—not seeing it as Gaskell’s betrayal of Brontë as an amateur, but asking what it means that she distinguishes between the more professionalized and commercialized aspects of the London literary scene versus the more high-minded intellectual exchange in this northern triangle.

Linda Peterson is currently editing The Life of Charlotte Brontë for the Pickering and Chatto edition of Gaskell’s Complete Works.

Department of English
P.O. Box 208302
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520-8302
linda.peterson@yale.edu