Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn | Carol A. Martin (essay date 1989)
Carol A. Martin (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Gaskell's Ghosts: Truths in Disguise," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 27-40.
[In the following essay, Martin discusses the role of the supernatural in Gaskell's novels and shorter works.]
"Do you believe in ghosts?" someone is supposed to have asked Madame du Deffand, to which she replied, "No . . . but I am afraid of them."1
If that question had been posed to Elizabeth Gaskell a hundred years later, she might have responded similarly: "No, but I write stories about them, I tell tales of them by my friends' firesides, and I have seen them." For Gaskell, not unlike Madame du Deffand and many others before and since, is ambivalent—admittedly superstitious and yet a woman of great common sense and considerable knowledge. A cousin of Charles Darwin and a devout Unitarian, in the mid-century crisis of faith she repudiated neither science nor belief and...
[The entire page is 7059 words long]
Navigate
