Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, (1810-1865), English novelist, known for her thorough research, compassion toward her subjects, and skillful narrative style. She was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London. Her first novel was Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life (pub. anonymously in 1848), an attack on the behavior of factory employers during the 1840s, and a time of depression and hardship for the British working class. The book won her the friendship of Charles Dickens, who requested a contribution to his new magazine, Household Words. Between 1851 and 1853 Gaskell contributed the papers later published under the title of Cranford (1853). This book, concerning elegant gentility among women in a country town, has become an English classic.

Among the many friends attracted by Mrs. Gaskell was Charlotte Brontë, who died in 1855 and whose biography Charlotte's father, Patrick Brontë, urged her to write. The Life of Charlotte Brontë is at once a work of art and a well-documented interpretation of its subject. Gaskell's other works include the novels and stories The Moorland Cottage (1850); Ruth (1853); North and South (1855), another compassionate study of conditions in Manchester; and the posthumously published Wives and Daughters (1866).

2.5 Brontë

Brontë is the name of three English novelists, also sisters, whose works have become beloved classics. The sisters Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Emily (Jane) Brontë (1818-1848), and Anne Brontë (1820-1849), were born in Thornton. Their father, Patrick Brontë, who had been born in Ireland, was appointed rector of Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors. In 1824, when their mother died, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School in Cowan Bridge; this was the original on which was modeled the infamous Lowood School of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. Maria and Elizabeth returned to Haworth ill and died in 1825. Charlotte and Emily were later taken away from the school due to the grim conditions and the sisters' illness.

Charlotte went away to school again, in Roe Head, in 1831, returning home a year later to continue her education and teach her sisters. She returned to Roe Head in 1835 as a teacher, taking Emily with her. In 1842, conceiving the idea of opening a small private school of their own, and to improve their French, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to a private boarding school. The death of their aunt, who had kept house for the family, compelled their return, however. Emily stayed at Haworth as housekeeper. Anne became governess in a family near York. Charlotte went back to Brussels, her experiences there forming the basis of the rendering, in Villette (1853), of Lucy Snowe's loneliness, longing and isolation.

Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems led to the decision to have the sisters' verses published; these appeared, at their own expense, as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), each sister using her own initials in these pseudonyms. Two copies were sold.

Each sister then published a novel. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was published first, in 1847; Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights appeared a little later that year.

Emily caught cold and died December 19, 1848. Anne too died, on May 28, 1849. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, had been published the year before; the account of a drunkard's degeneration, it was as deeply rooted in personal observation as Agnes Grey, the study of a governess's life.

Alone now with her father at Haworth, Charlotte resumed work on the novel Shirley (1849). This was the least successful of her novels, although its depiction of the struggle between masters and workers in the Yorkshire weaving industry a generation earlier prevented Charlotte's relying solely on intense subjectivity. This strain of realism was the source of her power, as can be seen earlier in Jane Eyre and later in Villette and The Professor (1857). In 1852, Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Pregnant in 1855, she became ill and died March 31 of that year of tuberculosis.

Since their deaths, new generations of readers have been fascinated by the circumstances of the Brontës’ lives, their untimely deaths, and their astonishing achievements. Jane Eyre's popularity has never faded; it is a passionate expression of female issues and concerns. It presented a thinking, feeling woman, craving for love but able to renounce it at the call of impassioned self-respect and moral beliefs. The book's narrator and main character, Jane Eyre, is an orphan and is governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester, the Byronic and enigmatic employer with whom she falls in love. Her love is mutual, but on the wedding morning it comes out that Rochester is already married and keeps his mad and depraved wife in the attics of his mansion. Jane leaves him, suffers hardship, and finds work as a village schoolmistress. When Jane learns, however, that Rochester has been crippled and blinded while trying vainly to rescue his wife from the burning house that she herself had set afire, Jane seeks him out and marries him. There are melodramatic naïvetés in the story, and Charlotte's elevated rhetorical passages do not much appeal to modern taste, but she maintains her hold on the reader. The novel is subtitled An Autobiography and is written in the first person; but, except in Jane Eyre's impressions of Lowood, the autobiography is not Charlotte's. Personal experience is combined with suggestions from widely different sources, and the Cinderella theme may well come from Samuel Richardson's Pamela. The action is carefully motivated, and apparently episodic sections, like the return to Gateshead Hall, are seen to be necessary to the full expression of Jane's character and the working out of the threefold moral theme of love, independence, and forgiveness.

The influence of Charlotte's novels was much more immediate than that of Wuthering Heights. Charlotte's combination of romance and satiric realism had been the mode of nearly all the women novelists for a century. Her fruitful innovations were the presentation of a tale through the sensibility of a child or young woman, her lyricism, and the picture of love from a woman's standpoint.
Emily Brontë's work on Wuthering Heights cannot be dated, and she may well have spent a long time on this intense, solidly imagined novel. It is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation, its abstention from all comment by the author, and its unusual structure. It recounts in the retrospective narrative of an onlooker, which in turn includes shorter narratives, the impact of the foundling Heathcliff on the two families of Earnshaw and Linton in a remote Yorkshire district at the end of the 18th century. Embittered by abuse and by the marriage of Cathy Earnshaw—who shares his stormy nature and whom he loves—to the gentle and prosperous Edgar Linton, Heathcliff plans a revenge on both families, extending into the second generation. Cathy's death in childbirth fails to set him free from his love-hate relationship with her, and the obsessive haunting persists until his death; the marriage of the surviving heirs of Earnshaw and Linton restores peace.

Sharing her sisters' dry humour and Charlotte's violent imagination, Emily diverges from them in making no use of the events of her own life and showing no preoccupation with a spinster's state or a governess's position. Working, like them, within a confined scene and with a small group of characters, she constructs an action, based on profound and primitive energies of love and hate, which proceeds logically and economically, making no use of such coincidences as Charlotte relies on, requiring no rich romantic similes or rhetorical patterns, and confining the superb dialogue to what is immediately relevant to the subject. The sombre power of the book and the elements of brutality in the characters affronted some 19th-century opinion.

Lecture 6

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE 2^ND HALF OF THE 19^TH CENTURY

Questions:

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