The Even Hand of Mrs. Gaskell

& Virginia Woolf's view of domestic feminism

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) is not as well-known as Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, although three of her novels, Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), and Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1866), were serialized by the BBC. Other works, including short stories, served as the basis for four films (two of them silent). Gaskell produced several collections of short fiction, including ghost stories, and wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Her reputation has slowly risen. She has her own volume in The Cambridge Companion series (2007).

Gaskell was a clergyman’s wife and the mother of five children. She struggled to create new paths for women, but she did so while fulfilling many conventionally female obligations, including those attached to her husband’s position. Not all of Gaskell’s readers approved of her embrace of traditional women’s roles or endorsed her ideas about behavior appropriate to women or to men. For a long time she was known only as “Mrs. Gaskell,” a subtle mark of the domestic contentment that she combined with her advocacy of women.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was among the skeptics. Woolf herself was married, but she could never conceal her hard-earned resentment of men, starting with her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the longtime editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and the author of an important history of English thought. Woolf had mixed feelings about him; his shadow stands over To the Lighthouse, her greatest novel.

In her comments on Gaskell, Woolf hints at her doubts about the compromises—the even-handedness—that made Gaskell who she was. Gaskell herself could be pointed, but she lacked Woolf’s political edge. Gaskell is among the women writers named on the first page of Woolf’s feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf contrasts men who drink wine with women who drink water, and men who have all the money with women who have nothing. It is safe to say that Gaskell tolerated wine and that she was not poor. Having known, as she did, some of the privileges that Woolf believed women were denied, perhaps Gaskell was not woman—or is the word I want “victim”?—enough for Woolf.

Woolf complained that men never tired of writing about women. One result was that, if they wrote at all, women wrote as if they were men. There were women who wrote like women, including Austen and Brontë, but the general standard for women writers was low. Men thought that the only sign of excellence within the grasp of female novelists was “work courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex.” This is not a phrase from 1828, when we might expect it to have been made (according to Woolf), but from a 1928 edition of Life and Letters, a London review in which Austen was cited as a model of this kind of “courageous” writing (Room, p. 78).

Gaskell took care to be just to men as well as to women. In this (and other things) she was too balanced, too even-tempered, for Woolf’s taste. “Her heroes and heroines remain solid rather than interesting,” Woolf asserted, adding, “with all her humour she was seldom witty, and the lack of wit in her character-drawing leaves the edges blunt.” This lack of wit is Woolf’s chief reservation about Gaskell.

Woolf was wrong to suggest that Gaskell’s “character-drawing” was “blunt.” One measure of Gaskell’s sharpness, and also a measure of her tact, is her use of such signal terms as “feminine,” “manly” and “unmanly,” and “masculine.” Another is her willingness to see the weak as well as the strong sides of her characters. Here I look at some examples in her last novel, Wives and Daughters. Published in 1866, after her death, the book is Gaskell’s fullest exploration of human behavior as it emerges in the interplay of women and men, women and women, and men and men.  

Wives and Daughters concerns Mr. Gibson, a widower, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick, a widow. Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick become half-sisters when Molly’s father marries Cynthia’s mother. Gaskell matches the girls to brothers named Osborne and Roger, members of the wealthy Hamley family. This plan allows Gaskell to contrast two kinds of women and two kinds of men. Molly is homespun, Cynthia glamorous; Osborne is smart and sensitive, Roger deliberate and dull. By exploring differences within the sexes, Gaskell uncovers more about both the masculine and the feminine than do many feminist writers—including, I would venture, Virginia Woolf.

The 1999 BBC 4-part series: daughters Cynthia, center, in white, and Molly standing to the right, both gazing at their mothers. (Elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk)

Gaskell had firm ideas about the strengths and the limitations of both sexes. There are one-sided or flat characters aplenty in Wives and Daughters, but the central figures are not among them. Roger, a scientist, is juxtaposed to Osborne, who is an accomplished scholar but who, unlike Roger, has not found his way in the  world. Gaskell spells out their differences:

“Osborne, the eldest—so called after his mother's maiden name—was full of taste, and had some talent. His appearance had all the grace and refinement of his mother's. He was sweet-tempered and affectionate, almost as demonstrative as a girl. He did well at school, carrying away many prizes; and was, in a word, the pride and delight of both father and mother; the confidential friend of the latter, in default of any other.”

What Gaskell writes about Roger is only slightly more complimentary:

“Roger was two years younger than Osborne; clumsy and heavily built, like his father; his face was square, and the expression grave, and rather immobile. He was good, but dull, his schoolmasters said. He won no prizes, but brought home a favourable report of his conduct. When he caressed his mother, she used laughingly to allude to the fable of the lap-dog and the donkey; so thereafter he left off all personal demonstration of affection.”  (Chapter 4)

Roger has none of Osborne’s feminine touches. The masculine heart of the book, Roger resembles their father—inexpressive, grave, clumsy, but well-behaved. He reminds his mother of Aesop’s fable about the donkey (Roger) who is jealous of the lap-dog (Osborne). The donkey grows tired of working while the dog plays. The donkey mistakenly tries to act like a dog. For his trouble, he is, in the fable, struck by his master and forced to work even harder.

In Aesop it is the donkey’s master who keeps him in line. In Gaskell’s version, it is the donkey’s mother. Roger learns to avoid seeking his mother’s affection; she prides herself on denying it to him. The effect is to push him out of the family circle, for which he is too masculine. He distinguishes himself as a scientist and works in Africa for a time. The moral of the fable about the lapdog and the donkey is to be happy with what you are. That is a test for Roger, who, as second son, is not likely to inherit the family’s wealth, and who is second fiddle to the bright and favored Osborne.

The plot thickens. Osborne turns out to have a wife who is, to general dismay, French, and a child. When Osborne becomes sick and dies, his wife and their child move to Osborne’s family home. The child becomes the heir, meaning that the family’s wealth bypasses Roger. Cynthia is quickly married to a wealthy man and set up in London, to her ambitious mother’s satisfaction. The original quadrangle is now reduced to a pair, Molly and Roger. But their path to happiness is not smooth.

Whereas Osborne had been an open book, Roger is a mystery. He is thought to be a figure for Darwin (Darwin was Gaskell’s cousin). Society admires Roger’s belief in progress, his research, and his success in the intellectual life. But society worries that he might be too invested in social change. People are concerned that he has lived among wild people and wonder if nice young ladies should know him.

Molly’s father, Mr. Gibson, communicates most of these reservations, but with a touch of amused irony. He detects Molly’s interest in Roger and teases her. Since his return from Africa, Mr. Gibson says, Roger is bronzed. He “looks broader, stronger—more muscular,” “brown as a berry for one thing; caught a little of the negro tinge, and a beard as fine and sweeping as my bay-mare's tail" (ch. 55). These details intensify Roger’s masculinity but make him less an object of admiration in polite society. A tinge of color? A beard as sweeping as a horse’s tail? His growing reputation as a scientist does him no good either.

What does Gaskell tell us about Molly and Cynthia as women? The important clue is that Cynthia liked to be liked, as did her mother, whereas Molly and her father have “a high standard of conduct,” as Cynthia puts it, a standard of independent thinking that confuses Cynthia when she gets to know the Gibsons (ch. 37). What this tells us about Cynthia and her mother as manipulative women is, of course, not positive.

Yet even in the admirable Molly, Gaskell sometimes finds feminine dissembling, called “hobbledehoyhood,” or clumsiness, and “arrangements,” meaning distracting feminine business that is not transparent to men. Such “business” creates distance and can be helpful as a cushion against male bluntness (chs. 5, 8, 56). Molly herself finds feminine talk “trivial” (ch. 46), although feminine companionship is important to women, and to some men, including Molly’s father and Osborne (chs. 13, 29). The feminine part of Osborne’s character leads him to confide in his brother and to wish there were more feminine, comforting touches in his family home (ch. 23, 28).

These aspects of Gaskell’s narrative art suggest that she was more sophisticated than Woolf thought and that her understanding of character was mobile, balancing opposing inclinations. Couples are balanced as well. Osborne is set above Roger, Cynthia above Molly, but this paradigm suddenly shifts and the rules of the game are rewritten for everybody, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. There is nothing simple about Gaskell’s view of the four lovers especially. Gaskell proves that she can alter balances and build tension. Admittedly, these maneuvers take narrative time and space.

Woolf had a second reservation, and it is related to her (mistaken) view that Gaskell lacked narrative finesse. The second criticism is really a criticism of the expansive art of Gaskell’s age rather than of Gaskell herself. Woolf was not a fan of the traditional three-volume Victorian novel, with its elaborate plots and its detailed descriptions of ordinary life. Note the mention of Gaskell in Woolf’s 1931 review of Aurora Leigh, a verse novel by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

“The aunt, the antimacassars, and the country house from which Aurora escapes are real enough to fetch high prices in the Tottenham Court Road at this moment. The broader aspects of what it felt like to be a Victorian are seized as surely and stamped as vividly upon us as in any novel by Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell.”

Tottenham Court Road was (and still is) a major London market street, not so distant from what we can consider Bloomsbury Central, which in London was Gordon Square, but nonetheless another world. The broad aspects of Victorian life, with impressions “stamped” on the reader, attracted Trollope and Gaskell. But broad aspects of life were antithetical to Woolf and to her elusive, interior style. Woolf sought brevity and compression. She believed that the compression created by Browning’s verse form was far superior to the “gradual approach” of the prose writer and “his slow accumulation of careful detail.” The words “slow,” “careful,” and “accumulation” capture a narrative style Woolf disliked, a style that incorporated too much detail and invited too much response.

Trollope (above) also became a by-word for sentimental nonsense. In Kevin Hart’s splendid boyhood autobiography, Dark-Land (2024), Hart and his mother and father are walking home after seeing Mary Poppins. His mother scoffs at the idea that people “would burst into song like that,” and his father agrees that the movie was a “load of old Trollope” (p. 39).

What impressed me about the quotation above, from Woolf’s review of Browning, is the use of honorifics: “Mrs.” for Gaskell but no “Mr.” for Trollope, and no title for Browning. Woolf referred to authors using the forms then in use. One doesn’t want to read too much into Miss or Mrs. That said, on the first page of A Room of One’s Own we find plain Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, “the Brontës,” “George Eliot” (a special case), “Miss [Mary Russell] Mitford,” and “Mrs. Gaskell.” Those two ladies stand out.

Another Mrs. appears, this one in Woolf’s review of Mrs. Ellis H. (Esther Alice) Chadwick's biography, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories (1910), published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1910. This essay offers a few more clues about Woolf’s view of Gaskell and her view of biography. Woolf questioned Chadwick’s belief that readers would be interested in such things as the houses, gardens, and “haunts” associated with Gaskell. It did not matter that the homes and houses Chadwick discussed were important to Gaskell. What mattered was that they were not important to Woolf.

To Woolf, it seems, Mrs. Gaskell was utterly conventional. Chadwick paid close attention to Gaskell’s environment, leading Woolf, not unexpectedly, to write:

“The surprising thing is that there should be a public who wishes to know where Mrs Gaskell lived. Curiosity about the houses, the coats, and the pens of Shelley, Peacock, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith seems lawful. One imagines that these people did everything in a way of their own; and in such cases a trifle will start the imagination when the whole body of their published writings fails to thrill. But Mrs Gaskell would be the last person to have that peculiarity. One can believe that she prided herself upon doing things as other women did them, only better—that she swept manuscripts off the table lest a visitor should think her odd. She was, we know, the best of housekeepers, ‘her standard of comfort’, writes Mrs Chadwick, being ‘expensive, but her tastes were always refined’; and she kept a cow in her back garden to remind her of the country.”

We might pause over Woolf’s sarcasm here. Authors like Shelley “did everything in a way of their own” and so might prove inaccessible. Their loftiness might force common readers to use a “trifle” such as a pen or a coat to “start the imagination when the whole body of their published writings fails to thrill.”

Well, what was wrong with those readers, anyway, that they needed a trifle to arouse their interest? The ultimate snob, Woolf could be writing about herself and her own difficulty in “starting” the reader’s imagination. She would place her art in the same category as that of Shelley, Brontë, and Meredith, or other highly original and challenging authors.

Woolf had no interest in Gaskell’s houses and homes, but I doubt that other readers would have shared Woolf’s attitude. Chadwick’s approach was admittedly old-fashioned. The biographers of Woolf’s generation were no longer presenting their subjects with attention to material surroundings. That tradition was shattered by Woolf’s friend, Lytton Strachey, who published Eminent Victorians in 1918.

The tradition was, not incidentally, also satirized by Woolf in 1933, when she wrote Flush, a biography about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. The new biographers’ own ideas about their subjects were more important that the subjects themselves. Flush, which is quintessential Woolf, is about gender and sexual inequality, not Browning’s dog, the dog being a mere foil for Woolf’s observations on society and history.

Gaskell’s art was not lofty or challenging. Woolf implies that Gaskell was not original and did not do things in her own way. She followed the paths of others. That is why, unlike Shelley, Gaskell could “start” the imagination of her readers. Unlike great writers, Gaskell was accessible. Common touches, such “trifles” as those with which Chadwick had stuffed her biography, were not needed. Woolf’s criticism of Chadwick becomes a criticism of Gaskell as well.

Woolf was an early example of a modern type, the woke feminist who judges other women by their surroundings rather than by their achievements. One thinks of

Hilary Clinton sneering at women who stayed home to bake cookies, and then all but getting a patent on her own recipe for chocolate chip cookies. (Hilary was unlike other women, but, wait, also like them!) Even keeping a cow in Manchester was too much like “doing things as other women did them, only better,” at least as far as Woolf was concerned. What does this mean? Did Gaskell have access to fresher milk than her neighbors? For Woolf, nothing, even having a dairy of your own, was enough to earn Gaskell a little oddness.

Picking up “haunts” in Chadwick’s title, and alluding to Gaskell’s ghost stories and Gothic fiction, Woolf imagined Gaskell as a ghost returning to read what Chadwick had written. With this Strachey-esque move, Woolf creates her own version of Gaskell. “The ghost would feel grateful to the houses,” Woolf wrote; “it might give her a twinge to hear that she had ‘got into the best literary set of the day’, but on the other hand it would please her to read of how Charles Darwin was ‘the best-known naturalist’.”

We wonder why the ghost might feel “a twinge” at learning that Gaskell made it “into the best literary set of the day.” “Twinge” in Woolf’s time, or Gaskell’s, meant (and still means) “a sharp mental pain; a pang of shame, remorse, sorrow, or the like; a prick of conscience.” Perhaps Gaskell’s ghost is abashed to be reminded that, despite her humility and ordinariness, Gaskell was ambitious and striving, eager to get ahead. Woolf imagined Gaskell sweeping her manuscripts off the table “lest a visitor should think her odd.” Didn’t the visitor know about the cow? Was hiding the manuscripts an attempt to conceal ambition?

Woolf herself was ambitious, even competitive. She kept a careful eye on her career and on the careers of others. She felt no reservations about self-interest, such as those that, she implies, gave Gaskell’s ghost a twinge. At age 23, Woolf reviewed The Golden Bowl, the last novel of Henry James. One day she met him and listened patiently as he hemmed and hawed and finally said that he had heard “that you write, in short.” Waiting for him to say something was like waiting for “the hen to lay an egg,” Woolf said later (Lee, p. 218). But she mused that, in her old age, she would “discourse like Henry James,” confidently imagining herself in the mode of the esteemed author.

Woolf’s vision of Gaskell as a ghost prompts us to recall “A Haunted House,” a short story (more a “sketch,” as Leonard Woolf would describe it) that Woolf published in 1921 in Monday or Tuesday and that appeared, after her death, in a volume called A Haunted House and Other Stories.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf

“A Haunted House” is a brief episode in which a ghostly couple returns to their house and wanders through it, collecting some memories as they search for a treasure they left behind. The treasure might be the past itself, or the happiness they had there in life. They wander into the bedroom and hover over the occupants, “us,” one of whom is the narrator, “I.” The ghosts speak of their happiness, their “treasure.” Light from their eyes awakens the narrator, who speaks: “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.” It seems that the narrator knew all about it and had take possession of it herself.

Light from the ghosts’ eyes and “the light in the heart” merge in this quick, enigmatic gesture of possession and possessiveness. There is nothing ghoulish about Woolf’s ghost story, which has no connection the ghost tradition Gaskell explored. “A Haunted House” provides a frame for Woolf’s view of Gaskell. It’s not the house itself that matters to Woolf’s ghosts, but memories, the fragments that the house brings to mind, happiness that can be passed on to others, “the light in the heart.”

Unlike Woolf’s ghosts, Gaskell’s ghost returns for confirmation, comfort, and consolation of a housewifely kind. Woolf’s imagined ghosts float, snatching at memories of satisfaction, at the ephemeral and the fleeting—that is, looking for what Woolf valued. Flash and inspiration for Woolf, but for Gaskell the “slow accumulation of careful detail,” the very soul of an even temper.

Woolf moved with the times, and she continues to do so. I do not know what Woolf would make of them, but there are masses of websites for students that offer interpretations of “A Haunted House.” The sites offer plot summaries, study guides, test questions, and so on. Plot summaries? “A Haunted House” is three pages long.

Brevity was all for Woolf, compression. She liked novels (such as Browning’s verse novel) that were close to poetry. “A Haunted House,” with its many loose ends, has broken through to anthologies, one of the last places I would have expected to find work by Virginia Woolf.

Gaskell’s details have to play out in a certain way. They have to accumulate, to use Woolf’s dreaded word, in order to make sense of the extended plots of the Victorian novel. They have to gather and close in. Woolf makes do with less. Her details “start the imagination” even for young readers, it seems, because the details lead out, extend, even invite.

The popularity of “A Haunted House” in high school anthologies is bright spot in the dismal landscape of critical pedagogy. What do they do with it, I wonder? The wokest teacher would have trouble finding a transgender-positive message in Woolf’s brief tale. But perhaps, like her students, she might find something better. Possibly, if she could even think of such a thing, she might find “the light in the heart” that Woolf can switch on for attentive readers.

Sources

Hart, Kevin. Dark-Land. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader, 2^nd series, 1935.

——. Flush: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1933.

——. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.

——. Review of Aurora Leigh. The Yale Review. June 1, 1931. https://yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-aurora-leigh