Elizabeth Gaskell and the short story

Elizabeth Gaskell was the author of over forty short stories. Despite the resurgence in Gaskell criticism over the past three decades, these stories have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. Following an account of how the Victorian short story has been re-evaluated by literary critics, this introductory survey illuminates Gaskell’s key contributions to the development of the genre. Our discussion is structured around several areas of critical investigation that have been at the forefront of Gaskell studies over the past few years. These include: the position of Victorian short fiction in relation to predominant accounts of the form’s development; Gaskell’s engagement with the periodical press and the Victorian literary marketplace; her response to the connection between short stories and the Christmas season; and her deployment of supernatural and sensational tropes. The image that emerges is that of a professional woman of letters who used shorter fiction as a space to experiment with new narrative methods, unusual characterisation, and contentious themes. Concluding with some reflections on the two-part review in All the Year Round, newly attributed to Gaskell in July 2015, we suggest how Gaskell’s engagement with the ‘ungodly spinnings’ of French ballad and narrative tradition might have helped shape her own practice as a master of the form

Josephine Butler's serial auto/biography: writing the changing self through the lives of others

Josephine Butler, controversial and pioneering feminist reformer of the late nineteenth-century, never wrote an autobiography, but she articulated self-understandings indirectly through writing deeply self-reflexive constructions of others’ lives. While this strategy has been recognised in isolated biographies, I show Butler’s auto/biography as a serial process, comparing John Grey of Dilston (1869) with Catharine of Siena (1878) to show how Butler’s conceptions of herself changed significantly in the early part of her career. She moves from modelling herself on the gender-transcendent liberal reformer, to modelling herself on the radical female prophet, whose sex was a vital qualification for spiritual and political power. Finding she could no longer position her feminist campaign within the broad cause of Victorian liberal reform, Butler turned from her paternal examplar to a medieval female saint-prophet, whose authority was located in her outsider status and in her intrinsically womanly nature. This comparative discussion, enlightened by reference to Butler’s unpublished letters, shows Butler’s change from positioning her public work within the reform tradition of liberalism to that of apocalyptic feminism. It also sheds a new light on Victorian women’s coded strategies of self-representation, and more generically into the use of sequential biographies as vehicles for articulating changing self-conceptions

Faith, feeling, reality: Anne Bronte as an existentialist poet

Anne Bronte's struggles with her faith, as presented in her religious poetry of the 1840s, are here framed in terms of the long tradition of Christian existentialism. Her poetry is considered as an expression of an alienated sensibility, in which she diagnoses the given conditions of being as profoundly, painfully disappointing. Bronte reasons from this state of feeling, to achieve a new commitment to living out a Christian life while devoid of emotional conviction in its premises. Read in the light of nineteenth- and twentieth-century existentialist philosophers, Bronte's poetry transcends its historical particularities to articulate a religious perspective based on emotional needs

Marriage in matriarchy: matrimony in women's utopian fiction 1888-1909

In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, marriage came under substantial attack as an institution that, without radical reform, would keep women in a state of virtual slavery to men. Yet many voices claimed that marriage could be reborn as a fulfilling and non-oppressive partnership if its terms were thoroughly rewritten, with women’s interests at heart. A number of feminist utopia texts published in this era demonstrate the protests and aspirations of some women regarding matrimony, by presenting alternative worlds in which marriage suits the emancipated female. The focus is on Jane Hume Clapperton’s Margaret Dunmore: or, A Socialist Home (1888), Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889), Amelia Mears’ Mercia, The Astronomer Royal: A Romance (1895), Florence Ethel Mills Young’s The War of the Sexes (1905) and Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909). While political equality is taken as a given, these texts also address economic independence, divorce, the apportioning of housework, motherhood, and the place marriage has in women’s lives comparable to and independent vocation, other friendships, and engagement in community. Marriage is shown as redeemable only if women are granted equality in the economic, legal, cultural as well as political spheres

Elizabeth Gaskell and the Madonna: metaphors of the maternal divine

Gaskell evokes the image of the Madonna in several fictional works, to consider its value as a metaphor for the maternal aspect of God. Her representation of the Marian cult is placed in the context of contemporary debates about the universal value of the Virgin Mary as a religious symbol, a discourse which includes the voices of Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, and Sarah Stickney Ellis among others. Gaskell’s Mariology is shaped by Unitarian theological views on the use of religious images, and by Gaskell’s own ambivalence towards the spiritual/moral status of maternal feeling. Thus her fiction includes multiple versions of the Madonna, which are invested with different symbolisms, and which Gaskell variously celebrates and critiques. In 'Cranford' and to an extent ‘The Poor Clare’, the Virgin Mary is a sympathetic and counter-cultural icon, invested with egalitarian and feminist values. Yet in ‘The Poor Clare’ the cult of the semi-divine grieving mother is shown to be ethically dangerous. The protagonist in 'Ruth' is informed by many ideas of the Madonna, including the biblical Mary, the Mater Amabilis, the Mother of Mercy, and the pagan Magna Mater

Josephine Butler, Esoteric Christianity and the Biblical Motherhood of God

This article addresses feminist campaigner and radical theologian Josephine Butler, who explored the idea of God as a mother in her late writings. For Butler, the metaphor of divine motherhood symbolised universal salvation, social transformation in the spirit of apocalyptic feminism, and divine immanence within the material and social worlds, including animal souls and inorganic phenomena. Her letters and her published works – including The Lady of Shunem and her privately printed ‘The Morning Cometh’ – are contextualised among the religious writings of Christian Theosophists such as John Pulsford, Elizabeth Charles, Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, by whom she was influenced. As well as showing Butler to have had more unorthodox religious ideas and connections than has been recognised, the article presents a late-nineteenth-century tradition of maternal theology, based on Christian sources and scripture

Literary theology by women writers of the nineteenth century

Examining popular fiction, life writing, poetry and political works, Rebecca Styler explores women's contributions to theology in the nineteenth century. Female writers acted as amateur theologians through the use of secular literary forms, through which they questioned the Christian tradition relative to contemporary concerns about political ethics, gender identity, and personal meaning. Each writer negotiates the gendered constraints and opportunities available to her particular religious setting and her chosen literary genre. Expressing frustrations with their inherited religious tradition, each nonetheless finds resources within it to reconfigure Christianity in creative and earthly ways, to meet pressing personal and social needs. Subjects include the novelist Emma Worboise, Anne Bronte's poetry, Harriet Martineau's Unitarian writings, Josephine Butler's campaign literature, and collective biographies of Bible women by writers including Clara Balfour, Sarah Hale and Anna Jameson

Josephine Butler, Esoteric Christianity and the Biblical Motherhood of God

This article addresses feminist campaigner and radical theologian Josephine Butler, who explored the idea of God as a mother in her late writings. For Butler, the metaphor of divine motherhood symbolised universal salvation, social transformation in the spirit of apocalyptic feminism, and divine immanence within the material and social worlds, including animal souls and inorganic phenomena. Her letters and her published works – including The Lady of Shunem and her privately printed ‘The Morning Cometh’ – are contextualised among the religious writings of Christian Theosophists such as John Pulsford, Elizabeth Charles, Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, by whom she was influenced. As well as showing Butler to have had more unorthodox religious ideas and connections than has been recognised, the article presents a late-nineteenth-century tradition of maternal theology, based on Christian sources and scripture

Anne Bronte

Bibliographical entry, including a guide to secondary scholarship and an overview of critical history on this author's fiction and poetry

The problem of 'evil' in Elizabeth Gaskell's Gothic tales

Elizabeth Gaskell uses Gothic as a symbolic language to explore the dark side of Unitarian thought. She explores, in rationalist terms, evil's origins, effects and remedy, using Gothic tropes as metaphors for humanly created misery. Gaskell locates the roots of 'evil' in an unenlightened social order, and its remedy in self-sacrifical giving which reverses the effects of injustice. The article studies 'The Crooked Branch' and 'The Poor Clare', with some reference to 'Lois the Witch'. The social and familial construction of evil are addressed, as well as tensions between moral determinism and personal responsibility, and Gaskell's attitudes to salvation theology and aspects of Roman Catholicism