SOURCE: "Cousin Phillis, the Short Stories, and Cranford," in Elizabeth Gaskell, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 48-77.

[In the following excerpt, Lansbury presents an overview of Gaskell's short stories.]

It was not unusual for the short story in [the mid-nineteenth century] to be a prelude, a testing piece for a subsequent novel. Themes were tried out on the public in one of the weekly or monthly magazines and, if the response were favorable, then a novel would follow in due course. Dickens's own short fiction frequently enunciates situations and expresses moods that were later developed in longer works. Thackeray's snobs, grimacing and strutting through the pages of Punch, can be found refined and humanized in Vanity Fair. Most Victorian novelists moved easily between journalism and fiction, frequently conflating the two forms.

Gaskell had begun her public career as a writer of short stories and essays, and she continued composing them to the end. "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" (1847) had established a setting and provided characters who then moved onto the larger stage of Manchester in Mary Barton (1848). When this novel received critical acclaim Dickens wrote to Gaskell requesting a contribution for his journal Household Words. From the cast of Mary Barton she selected Esther and changed her to Lizzie Leigh, the errant daughter of a devout farming family that has emigrated to Manchester. "Lizzie Leigh" (1850) shows Dickens's hand guiding the plot at every turn and producing a sentimental and predictable conclusion. It was Dickens who altered the grimly laconic "A Night's Work" to "A Dark Night's Work" (1863) and changed the title of "The Crooked Branch" (1859) to "The Ghost in the Garden Room," a catchy, glib, and deceptive invitation to the reader that failed to produce either a ghost or even a garden room. What worked so well for Dickens often resulted in something resembling flashy advertising copy for other writers.

Nevertheless, despite Dickens's frequent and unfortunate influence upon her work, Gaskell's short stories display at their best a psychological intensity and graphic singularity of theme that set them apart from contemporary fiction. Where Dickens was sentimental, she was toughminded and shrewd; where he constructed explosive denouements she instinctively sought the wry unfoldings of passion and conscience. The rub was that her area of greatest weakness, the external delineation of event and character, was most susceptible to Dickens's influence. It was not a ghost that returned to rob and destroy Nathan and Hester Huntroyd in "The Crooked Branch" but their only son, Benjamin, who was quite prepared to murder them for their money. This is the truth more horrifying than any visitation of the supernatural.

Indeed, like those of Sheridan Le Fanu, Gaskell's ghosts are more often the expression of a troubled mind rather than an invading diabolical force. One is reminded of the old North Country saying that it is not the dead who should be feared, but the living. So in the delightful "Curious if True" (1860), the narrator, Richard Whittingham, who may possibly be a figure of fairy tale himself, dreams of, or perhaps actually attends, a ball where Blue Beard matches wit with Tom Thumb and a little girl hurries past with a repentant wolf. And the Gothic conclusion of guilt and revenge in "The Old Nurse's Story" (1852) is deliberately related by a practical, unimaginative woman who comes under the spell of her young charge Rosamond, a child capable of evoking the passions of the past and imposing them on all around her. The source of the supernatural is as subtly evaded in this story as in Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." Generally, the seemingly supernatural is a manifestation of individual and social hysteria where madness can extend from a family to a whole community. "Lois the Witch" (1859) is not a study of the occult in Salem, but the delineation of a religious fanaticism leading irresistibly to mass lunacy and bloody persecution.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Gaskell never saw the patriarchal family as the ideal, or even natural, ordering of society. Instead she offered unusual groupings of people spanning sex, age, and class, frequently women capable of sustaining each other under the same roof after the fashion of her own Aunt Lumb. George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss recounts an accepted relationship between a brother and sister—Maggie is dominated by Tom and her life is inevitably ruined by men unworthy of her love. When Maggie confronts Tom with the bitter reproach ". . . You are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world" he replies bluntly, "Then, if you can do nothing, submit to those who can." But not even a brother's threats of physical violence and a mother's tears can make Gaskell's Maggie in The Moorland Cottage reject the man she loves. She answers them both simply:

"I cannot give up Frank," said she in a low, quiet voice. Mrs. Browne threw up her hands, and exclaimed in terror—"Oh, Edward, Edward! go away—I will give you all the plate I have; you can sell it—my darling, go!" "Not till I have brought Maggie to reason," said he, in a manner as quiet as her own, but with a subdued ferocity in it, which she saw, but which did not intimidate her. (chap. 9)

There is no appeal to the ways of the world and of society here in Eliot's customary fashion, simply the conviction that it is often a woman's duty to deny the assumed moral authority of a man. In The Moorland Cottage Maggie resists all threats and eventually her courage triumphs over the opposition of family and friends. Whereas Eliot shows women demeaned and diminished by their need for love, Gaskell insists that women are capable of challenging male authority and surviving to assert their independence like Margaret Hale in North and South and Mary Barton. The most extraordinary expression of love and courage in all Gaskell's work is not between a man and a woman, but between two loving women in a relationship that can be seen as a most unconventional family.

"The Grey Woman" (1861) is one of Gaskell's most remarkable and perceptive studies of female psychology. It has always been overlooked because the story makes use of the conventional forms and devices of the Gothic novel, and it is only recently that the Gothic has come to be seen as something more than a clattering of chains and piercing shrieks from the east wing. The Gothic is an expression of female manipulative power moving between the climacterics of sexuality and terror. There is the narrative perspective of the young virgin who confronts a dark and Satanic lover in a house isolated from the world. The heroine's love is obsessive and is set against the terrifying reality of a mad wife and elements of the supernatural. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with its countless imitators can be seen as the classic of this form. In order to be fulfilled sexually the mad wife must be disposed of and the lover transformed into a less dominating figure. Only then can the heroine say, "Reader, I married him." Gaskell takes all these conventions and deliberately sets them at odds in "The Grey Woman" to make a new and compelling statement about the nature of woman and love.

The work is set within the frame of cheerful travelers taking shelter in a German mill from a thundering storm. There the narrator sees the portrait of a gray woman whose unearthly beauty and pallor of grief cannot be concealed by the inept brush of a provincial artist. The miller produces a chronicle written by the woman in the portrait, a woman now long dead and almost forgotten by her own family. Anna Scherer, the mill owner's daughter, had been a great beauty with an aversion for men and the sexuality they represented. Karl, the oldest apprentice, loved her and wanted to make her his wife but "she had no notion of being married, and could not bear anyone who talked . . . about it." (chap. 1)

When her brother marries, Anna is dispatched to the home of her friend Sophie Rupprecht in Carlsruhe. At first, she is only amused and occasionally bored by the attention of her many admirers until a strange young man arrives and immediately captivates her by his appearance. At this point the conventions of the Gothic are adjusted for a subversive and radical theme to emerge: it is not the traditional hero of darkly virile masculine strength who charms Anna but a man of title, de la Tourelle, who seems like a young girl. He has features "as delicate as a girl's" and his manners are soft and effeminate. The initial charm vanishes when de la Tourelle proposes marriage and Anna recognizes the man beneath the feminine appearance. It is seen as a good match and Anna is compelled to accept.

Tourelle's chateau in the Vosges is a mysterious castle with winding corridors and locked doors where Anna finds herself a prisoner attendant upon the moods of her strangely feminine jailer. Desperate with fear and loneliness, a protector of strength and courage arrives when Amante, a Norman servant, is brought to be her maid. Immediately there is the distinction of appearance between her husband and Amante. Anna is drawn to her at first sight: "She was tall and handsome, though upwards of forty, and somewhat gaunt." Here indeed is the Gothic hero, older than the heroine, resourceful, and a little contemptuous of Anna's childlike fears.

Servant becomes protector and lover when the two women accidentally discover Tourelle's real avocation as leader of a gang of brigands, the dreaded Chauffeurs, who rob, torture, and murder their victims. They escape and take refuge in an old mill where Amante disguises herself as a tailor wearing male dress, while Anna darkens her face and cuts her hair to seem like a tailor's wife. Anna has not told her husband that she is with child for he has sworn to destroy it or any others she may have. Soon Anna and Amante come to see and speak of the unborn child as their own as they flee from one hiding place to another with Tourelle and his men in pursuit.

The women take refuge in Frankfort, where Anna's child is born.

At length my child was born—my poor, worse than fatherless, child. It was a girl, as I had prayed for. I had feared lest a boy might have something of the tiger nature of its father; but a girl seemed all my own. And yet not all my own, for the faithful Amante's delight and glory in the babe almost exceeded mine; in outward show it certainly did.

Amante is now husband and father, going out to work in neighboring houses until the day comes when she is recognized and murdered by Tourelle and his henchman, Lefebvre. Eventually Tourelle is brought to justice and Anna marries the doctor who attended Amante in her last hours. Within a very short time Anna is a widow and later records the story of her daughter, thus successfully preventing her marrying the man she loves. By cruel coincidence the daughter has fallen in love with the son of one of her father's victims, but again there is an enigmatic thrust to this incident. Is it conscience that dictates the marriage should not take place, or the mother's desire that her daughter remain single, aloof from all masculine passion?

"The Grey Woman" challenges many of the implicit assumptions of the Gothic form in a reversal of customary sexual roles: Tourelle, the effeminate and dangerous lover; Amante, the masculine and faithful husband. Because the story concludes with Anna's voice to the reader, there is no opportunity for the narrator's comment or explication, and in this way many of the questions the reader might wish to ask are left unanswered. Unquestionably, "The Grey Woman" is a powerful story that successfully uses and subverts the accepted Gothic tradition. Students of the Gothic would be well advised to consider it in the light of contemporary fiction.

In so many of the short stories conventions are deliberately set at odds by new and disturbing insights into character and society. "Morton Hall," for example, first published in November 1853 in Household Words, brings a new focus to the traditional tale of terror with its inevitable curse that ruins a noble house. Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) had given Scott's historical novels a popular cast with Rookwood in 1834, and stories of Cavaliers and Roundheads continued of flourish in novels and short stones. Depending on the religious and political temperament of the writer, either the Cavaliers or Roundheads were made the heroes of these accounts. Cromwell was a grave upholder of public and private morality or a fanatical zealot in these tales, and a romantic and sentimental cast was thrown over the whole period. The setting was always a stately home, with lovers from the contending parties and a curse.

Just as she was capable of subverting the Gothic by means of a particular narrative voice in "The Grey Woman," Gaskell uses a garrulous old woman in "Morton Hall" to imply that the Cavaliers and Roundheads were rather less heroic than the versions imposed on the reading public by popular fiction. The narrator in this case is a Cranfordian lady, Miss Bridget Sidebotham, who lives with her sister Ethelinda in the vicinity of Morton Hall, once the finest and most powerful estate in the neighborhood. The occasion for Miss Sidebotham's history of Morton Hall is her return from having helped at the laying out of the last of the Mortons, a Miss Phillis Morton, who had died of starvation in the old house while clinging to the last vestiges of her name and ancestry. Genteel poverty indeed!

At the heart of the story is the marriage between the royalist Sir John Morton and the daughter of the Puritan who had supplanted him as the owner of Morton Hall during the Interregnum. The quarrels between husband and wife, bitter and vindictive, reflect the issues of their opposing parties. The climax comes when Sir John refuses shelter to his wife's brother, condemning him to death as an enemy. Lady Morton then pronounces a curse on all of her husband's line that is fulfilled when Miss Phillis Morton's shriveled body is laid to rest.

Clearly this is as melodramatic as any of the popular renditions of the period, but there is a dislocation between the story and its rendering by Miss Sidebotham's recollection of what Mrs. Dawson, the Morton housekeeper, had told her mother. It is made apparent by this indirect irony, so typical of Gaskell, that stories that filtered down through the servants' hall will always find an eager audience in the general reading public, however inaccurate they may be. Less obvious is Gaskell's inference that the Civil War was not really an occasion for romantic taletelling, being more a time when sordid domestic differences were magnified to national causes. Admittedly, this is a questionable stance to take, but Gaskell was never moved by the pomp and circumstance of war, and, in a sense, "Morton Hall" is her response to the glamour given armed conflict. Typically Gaskell accomplishes this by means of a narrative voice that has more in common with the persona of Browning's dramatic monologues than the omniscient narrator of so many novels of the period.

Bridget Sidebotham's fortunes have sunk perilously close to the condition of Phillis Morton, and possibly for the same reasons. Pride and poverty often go hand in hand, and a disinclination for work can be a certain recipe for ruin. Bridget is so effective as a narrator because she shares a great many of the attitudes evidenced in the story of the curse. Breathlessly she tells the reader that perhaps her own lack of fortune may also be the result of a "curse":

. . . were the Sidebothams marked with a black mark in that terrible mysterious book which was kept under lock and key by the Pope and Cardinals in Rome? It was terrible, yet, somehow, rather pleasant to think of. So many of the misfortunes which had happened to us through life, and which we had called "mysterious dispensations," but which some of our neighbours had attributed to our want of prudence and foresight, were accounted for at once, if we were the objects of the deadly hatred of such a powerful order as the Jesuits, of whom we had lived in dread ever since we had read the "Female Jesuit."

All that Miss Sidebotham requires is that life should be accounted for in terms of a popular Gothic novel, and then she proceeds to relate the downfall of the Mortons in precisely that fashion. Like so many of her readers, Miss Sidebotham prefers prejudice to reasoned opinion and high romance to history. She states very firmly: "If there is one thing I do dislike more than another, it is a person saying something on the other side when I am trying to make up my mind—how can I reason if I am to be disturbed by another person's arguments?" It is the failure to reason, or even to listen to the other, that sets Sir John and Lady Morton at odds and extends to Roundhead refusal to countenance the views of Cavalier. This is not Harrison Ainsworth, or any of the more popular versions of the Interregnum, but it does reflect Gaskell's disinclination for any kind of historical romance that overlooks the reality of suffering and death.

One of Gaskell's most effective personae was that of a young ingenuous man, of the kind who was to relate the story of his cousin Phillis in the novella of that name. However, these young men who travel and observe are not all as artless as Paul Manning in Cousin Phillis. The narrator of "Six Weeks at Heppenheim" (1862) is a shrewd young Oxford graduate who deftly sets about matchmaking in the hotel at Heppenheim, where he arrives suffering from fever and slowly recuperates from his illness. Throughout the story there is his concern for Thekla, the maid who nurses him with such tenderness.

Thekla still loves the wastrel of her childhood, Franz Weber, and has unwisely refused an offer of marriage from Fritz Müller, the widower innkeeper. It is a simple story made complex by the narrator's condition and intentions.

At first, Thekla's predicament is little more than an interesting entertainment for the invalid made petulant and irritable by his disease; later, her happiness is to be the expression of his gratitude to her. The story begins with the statement of a remarkably practical and shrewd young man, clearly not the type to engage in romantic fancies or become interested in the plight of lovesick maids:

After I left Oxford, I determined to spend some months in travel before settling down in life. My father had left me a few thousands, the income arising from which would be enough to provide for all the necessary requirements of a lawyer's education, such as lodging in a quiet part of London, and fees in payment to the distinguished barrister with whom I was to read; but there would be a small surplus left over for luxuries or amusements; and, as I was rather in debt on leaving college, since I had forestalled my income, and the expenses of travelling would have to be defrayed out of my capital, I determined that they should not exceed fifty pounds. As long as that sum would last me I would remain abroad; when it was spent my holiday should be over, and I would return and settle down somewhere in the neighbourhood of Russell Square, in order to be near Mr. 's chambers in Lincoln Inn.

With his life planned in such orderly fashion, the narrator is justifiably upset when illness throws everything into disarray. It should be apparent from these opening lines that he is a young man who prizes neatness and order, one who will never hesitate to set the lives of others to rights even when his own has been disrupted by circumstance. He has all the makings of an admirable lawyer!

When he first becomes aware of Thekla it is through the mist of sickness, and even then he is caught between two moods: one of embarrassment that this hard-working young woman should spend her hours of well-earned rest at his side, the other, a childish fear that he is in no condition to be left untended through the night. It is these modulations of thought and feeling, which are so often at variance, that most characterize Gaskell's definition of character:

Night came on; the sounds of daily life died away into silence; the children's voices were no more heard; the poultry were all gone to roost; the beasts of burden to their stables; and travellers were housed. Then Thekla came in softly and quietly, and took up her appointed place, after she had done all in her power for my comfort. I felt that I was in no state to be left all those weary hours which intervened between sunset and sunrise; but I did feel ashamed that this young woman, who had watched by me all the previous night, and, for aught I knew, for many nights before, and had worked hard, been run off her legs, as English servants would say, all day long, should come and take up her care of me again; and it was with a feeling of relief that I saw her head bend forwards, and finally rest on her arms, which had fallen on the white piece of sewing spread before her on the table. She slept; and I slept. When I wakened dawn was stealing into the room, and making pale the lamplight. Thekla was standing by the stove, where she had been preparing the bouillon I should require on wakening. But she did not notice my half-open eyes, although her face was turned towards the bed. She was reading a litter slowly, as if its words were familiar to her . . .

With all an invalid's singleminded concern with trivialities, the elucidation of this letter becomes the narrator's major concern. Slowly he is drawn into Thekla's story and his health improves as he is able to convince Thekla that she is not morally bound to marry a man who had once rejected her and now returns, expecting her to be his wife and support. When Max Müller's little boy also succumbs to the fever, Thekla's doubts are swept away and she remains to nurse the child back to health.

The plot is predictable in the context of Victorian attitudes toward health and sickness, but Gaskell's vision goes beyond the merely trite when she sets out to analyze the feelings of her staid narrator. Only when he has brought peace and happiness to the lives of the simple folk at Heppenheim does he find his health restored. From being a tiresome guest at the inn he had become a member of Müller's family, holding a picture in his mind that is to become the future at Heppenheim:

As I sat down in my easy-chair close to the open window through which I had entered, I could see the men and women on the hill-side drawing to a centre, and all stand round the pastor, bare-headed, for a minute or so. I guessed that some words of holy thanksgiving were being said, and I wished that I had stayed to hear them, and mark my especial gratitude for having been spared to see that day. Then I heard the distant voices, the deep tones of the men, the shriller pipes of women and children, join in the German harvest-hymn, which is generally sung on such occasions; then silence, while I concluded that a blessing was spoken by the pastor, with outstretched arms; and then they once more dispersed, some to the village, some to finish their labours for the day among the vines. I saw Thekla coming through the garden with Max in her arms, and Lina clinging to her woollen skirts.

It is this scene that later becomes a central figure in Cousin Phillis, where Ebenezer Holman stands bareheaded among his workers in the field at Hope Farm, giving thanks to God. Holman's prayers fall on deaf ears in Cousin Phillis, but "Six Weeks at Heppenheim" ends in peace and with a blessing for all.

Gaskell can often be seen reworking scenes and characters from one story to the next in this fashion. "Crowley Castle" (1862), for example, uses characters that recall "The Grey Woman," but whereas the latter is a Gothic tale, "Crowley Castle" belongs to the popular mode for sensational fiction, those narratives that sent the reader into spasms of terror and dread. Mrs. Braddon and Harrison Ainsworth are not regarded as major writers today, but they enjoyed an enormous vogue in their own day. Their influence was pervasive in the writing of the period, and generally deleterious; however, Gaskell is unusually successful in this sensational mode. By emphasizing character and locality she manages to breathe life into mechanically predictable events.

Victorine is a diabolical Amante, a devoted servant who obligingly murders so that her mistress may become free to marry a rejected suitor, and then demands her mistress's love as the price of her silence. It is melodrama, but melodrama that works within the context of the medium. When Victorine cries out in baffled fury to Therese of the dark services she has rendered, her words carry the appropriate shuddering force:

"And is that what it has come to!" exclaimed Victorine. "In my country they reckon a building secure against wind and storm and all the ravages of time, if the first mortar used has been tempered with human blood. But not even our joint secret, though it was tempered well with blood, can hold our lives together!"

Like most political radicals, Gaskell always felt comfortable contemplating the downfall of ancient houses and their aristocratic owners. She never stood among ruins in the manner of Scott and Carlyle and contemplated a happier age. In temperament she was closer to Macaulay, who considered the Middle Ages a time of blight and oppression, and all periods prior to the present a pale foreshadowing of the prosperity of the future. Gaskell uses the convention of the ruined house to illustrate the follies of past times: the people she describes are foolish and arrogant and deserve no more than a place in the world of romance. For a writer who could be as discursive as Thackeray, Gaskell's description of her arrival at Crowley Castle is remarkably concise and effective:

We drove from the little sea-bathing place in Sussex, to see the massive ruins of Crowley Castle, which is the show-excursion of Merton. We had to alight at a field-gate, the road further being too bad for the slightly-built carriage, or the poor tired Merton horse; and we walked for about a quarter of a mile, through uneven ground which had once been an Italian garden; and then we came to a bridge over a dry moat, and went over the groove of a portcullis that had once closed in massive entrance, into an empty space surrounded by thick walls, draperied with ivy, but unroofed and open to the sky.

It is often overlooked to what extent murder was a recurring theme in Gaskell's work. In her first novel, Mary Barton, she had shown murder to be a social act and then traced its psychological implications for the individual. Two of her stories deal explicitly with murder within the family, crimes committed with deliberate intent in one case and as the result of aberrant passion in the other. Both "The Crooked Branch" (1859) and "A Dark Night's Work" (1863) are explorations into the nature of murder, but in each case the crimes are seen to be a disturbing extension of everyday life.

Nothing could be more disarmingly tranquil than Nab's-End Farm of Nathan Huntroyd, who married his old sweetheart, Hester Rose, when he was a man in his middle years. They had one son, Benjamin, a child of astonishing beauty and intelligence who was admired by all who saw him, and an idol (that fatal Gaskell term!) to his parents. Benjamin grew up with Bessy Rose, Hester's orphaned niece, and the parents cheerfully contemplated the day when the two young people would marry and carry on the farm. Admiration and indulgence, however, had their usual effect on the son and he grew up to be an ingrate and wastrel who returned one night with accomplices to murder his parents and steal their savings.

Told so baldly the story seems little more than a crime taken from the pages of any newspaper; what removes it from the merely sensational is its rendering of character. With the best possible intentions the Huntroyds have created a monster in their son, a boy who resembles the dandified Pip, who lives for the great expectations promised by his supposed patron, Miss Havisham. It is as though Gaskell had taken Pip from Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) and translated his character into everyday terms. In a sense "The Crooked Branch" is a commentary upon Dickens, suggesting that instead of repentance and redemption Pip may well have returned one night to murder Miss Havisham for her money. Gaskell was often sentimental in her admonitions to the reader, but seldom so in her perception of character.

Benjamin grows up despising his parents for their lack of gentility even as he expects them to support him in a station of life to which he has previously been unaccustomed. The role of a gentleman without recognition of its duties and obligations to others was a hollow sham—a license to impose upon others, in Gaskell's opinion.

Benjamin has acquired the accent of a gentleman, which alone is enough to enrage his father. Like Joe Gargery in Great Expectations he finds that he no longer speaks the same language as the young man who is now a gentleman. When Benjamin coolly demands three hundred pounds from his father the old man cannot contain his anger:

He was out of breath by this time. His son took his father's first words in dogged silence; it was but the burst of surprise he had led himself to expect, and did not daunt him for long.

"I should think, sir"—

"'Sir'—whatten for dost thou 'sir' me? Is them your manners? I'm plain Nathan Huntroyd, who never took on to be a gentleman; but I have paid my way up to this time, which I shannot do much longer, if I'm to have a son coming an' asking me for three hundred pound, just meet the same as if I were a cow, and had nothing to do but let down my milk to the first person as strokes me."

Bessy's quick wits and courage save her uncle and aunt when she hears intruders in the house. She runs to the neighboring farm where John Kirkby and several of his men are tending a sick cow. They arrive with pitchforks and attack the burglars, leaving two men wounded. Benjamin escapes and flees the country, a fugitive from justice. The horror of the crime is only elicited from the taciturn Nathan at the trial when his wife is called upon to say what she heard the third person left downstairs shout to his companions on the stairs:

"It wur my son, my only child, as called out for us t'open door, and who shouted out for to hold th' oud woman's throat if she did na stop her noise, when hoq'd fain ha cried for her niece to help."

The serious flaw in this story is Gaskell's determination to wring the last drop of feeling from the trial scene. This was always a set piece in contemporary fiction and Gaskell clearly falls into a conventional mode at the expense of the realism she has previously established. Nathan, Bessy, and Hester have depth and complexity; the judge and the lawyers are cut from cardboard and creak accordingly. The judge weeps, the jury sniffles, and we have that Victorian predilection for handing the reader a handkerchief and offering to blow his nose for him. Overwritten and vapid, these passages are in stark contrast to the rest of the story. What one remembers is Nathan courting his elderly sweetheart, dressed in his Sunday best and presenting himself at Mrs. Thompson's back door in Ripon, where Hester Rose is employed as a cook:

Hester stood there, in answer to the good sound knock his good sound oakstick made: she, with the light full upon her, he in shadow. For a moment there was silence. He was scanning the face and figure of his old love, for twenty years unseen. The comely beauty of youth had faded away entirely; she was, as I have said, homely-looking, plain-featured, but with a clean skin, and pleasant frank eyes. Her figure was no longer round, but tidily draped in a blue and white bed-gown, tied round her waist by her white apron-strings, and her short red linsey petticoat showed her tidy feet and ankles. Her former lover fell into no ecstasies. He simply said to himself, "She'll do"; and forthwith began upon his business.

The spare, laconic excellence of this prose does not require judges whose faces quiver all over and authorial comments describing the pitiable presence of Hester Huntroyd confronted by the jury.

Again, just as Dickens, with his customary regard for a good title at the expense of the story, had magisterially changed "The Crooked Branch" to "The Ghost in the Garden Room" when it first appeared in the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round in 1859, he altered Gaskell's chosen "A Night's Work" to the present title, "A Dark Night's Work" when the long short story first appeared in All the Year Round between January and March 1863. Gaskell and Dickens were both critical of the other at this time, preferring to correspond through intermediaries. She had determined never to publish with him again, and was outraged when he changed her title (G.L. No. 524). Dickens in turn complained that Ellinor Wilkins, the heroine of her work, was intolerably like Mrs. Gaskell. Ellinor is, of course, strong minded, resourceful, and intelligent, qualities that had little appeal to a writer who preferred his heroines to be "little."

Edward Wilkins is a tragic figure and as much a victim of his society as John Barton. Indeed, if Gaskell had revealed the miseries of the poor in Mary Barton, in "A Dark Night's Work" she shows how oppressive the rural gentry can be to a man who has every right to be numbered among them, save one thing only, his father's and his own profession—that of conveyancing attorney. The father had made the irremediable error of sending Edward to Eton, educating him as a gentleman, and then, instead of permitting him to go to university, forcing him "to return to Hamley to be articled to his father, and to assume the hereditary subservient position to lads whom he had licked in the playground, and beaten at learning."

It is this circumstance that inevitably leads to Wilkins's ruin and act of murder. No matter that he is rich, cultivated, and marries a young woman of aristocratic background, Miss Lettice Lamotte; he is still regarded as an upstart by the local squires, who envy his money and sneer at his lack of breeding. After his young wife's death, he finds little comfort in Hamley and makes even longer trips to London, where he can find company and friends. His only tie to the country is his daughter Ellinor and his failing and neglected practice.

In Hamley, Wilkins affects to despise the men and the society to which he passionately yearns to belong, a condition that causes him to spend more time at sport and in drinking than is wise for a solicitor. Only Anthony Trollope has surpassed Gaskell in the ability to describe the attraction and essential boorishness of the rural gentry at this time. It was an easy matter to deride the gentry, as Gaskell made clear in Wives and Daughters, but everyone in the county wanted to be their friend. The feeling of being only grudgingly accepted in this society extends to Ellinor, who can force herself to believe that she is happy while being politely snubbed at the Assembly balls.

Ellinor stood by her father watching the dances, and thankful for the occasional chance of a dance. While she had been sitting by her chaperone, Mr. Wilkins had made the tour of the room, dropping out the little fact of his daughter's being present, wherever he thought the seed likely to bring forth the fruit of partners. And some came because they liked Mr. Wilkins, and some asked Ellinor because they had done their duty dances to their own party and might please themselves. So that she usually had an average of one invitation to every three dances; and this principally towards the end of the evening, (chap. 5)

Ellinor's love is divided between her father and Ralph Corbet, an aspiring lawyer, who, being a prudent young man, is not unmindful of Ellinor's being an only child and heir to the fortunes of a rich widower. Unfortunately, Mr. Wilkins's wealth is being steadily diminished as he neglects his practice and finds more solace in the bottle than in his clients' affairs. Reluctantly appreciating that he needs a clerk to set his affairs in order he hires Dunster and immediately dislikes the man for his competence and his obvious disregard for the hallmarks of a gentleman: he is industrious, devout, and shabby. Gaskell shows Wilkins developing an intense loathing for Dunster because the latter embodies the image of what the county gentry would like to see in a local attorney—Dunster is the man Wilkins imagines that others see when they look beyond the fine horses and rare paintings to the local conveyancing attorney. His detestation for Dunster becomes obsessive at the same time as his reliance upon him grows and develops. Dunster is no Uriah Heep, simply a hardworking clerk who dreams of a partnership with Wilkins and a steady income in a respectable profession. Wilkins chafes under Dunster's control of his affairs, but he can only rage inwardly and turn for comfort to the bottle. What infuriates him is that Dunster is never openly critical of him, and he construes this as silent insolence:

Mr. Wilkins himself winced under his new clerk's order and punctuality; Mr. Dunster's raised eyebrows and contractions of the lips at some woeful confusion in the business of the office, chafed Mr. Wilkins more, far more, than any open expression of opinion would have done; for that he could have met and explained away, as he fancied. A secret respectful dislike grew up in his bosom against Mr. Dunster. He esteemed him, he valued him, and he could not bear him. Year after year, Mr. Wilkins had come to be more under the influence of his feelings, and less under the command of his reason. He rather cherished than repressed his nervous repugnance to the harsh measured tones of Mr. Dunster's voice; the latter spoke with a provincial twang which grated on his employer's sensitive ear. He was annoyed at a certain green coat which his new clerk brought with him, and he watched its increasing shabbiness with a sort of childish pleasure. But byand-by Mr. Wilkins found out that, by some perversity of taste, Mr. Dunster always had his coats, Sunday and working-day, made of this obnoxious colour; and this knowledge did not diminish his secret irritation, (chap. 3)

Ralph Corbet and Ellinor are unofficially engaged to be married, and her life is a pleasant round of domestic duties marred only by concern for her father's increasing dissipation. When troubled she can always console herself with planning for the time when she will be the wife of Ralph Corbet. One night she is disturbed by sounds of men arguing in the garden. A few moments later she hears furniture falling and goes downstairs to find Dunster lying dead in the living room. Wilkins could no longer bear the man's authority over his affairs and had killed him in a bout of drunken anger. Then ensues one of the most remarkable scenes in the literature of the period, for Ellinor, Dixon the gardener, and Wilkins drag Dunster's body out across the lawn and bury him.

Possibly it was this action on Ellinor's part that so affronted Dickens. After all, Esther Summerson, the heroine of Bleak House (1853), buries a doll, but that any of his heroines should be an accessory to murder is unthinkable. Gaskell was aware of the singularity of the incident and observes in her narrative that

Ellinor could not have told whether it was reason or instinct that made her act as she did during this awful night. When afterwards, notwithstanding her shuddering avoidance of it, the haunting memory would come and overshadow her, during many, many years of her life, she grew to believe that the powerful smell of the spilt brandy, absolutely intoxicated her—an unconscious Rechabite in practice. (chap. 7)

Wilkins explains Dunster's absence by declaring that his clerk has absconded with funds stolen from the office, and it is assumed that he has fled to America. Ellinor promptly falls ill, the traditional response to extreme stress, and on her recovery finds that her adored father has become a stranger to her. Neither Wilkins, Ellinor, nor Dixon can tolerate the other's presence without being reminded of the murder. Whenever they meet, the shadowy presence of Dunster is at their side. They are haunted by something more terrifying than a ghost, and that is the awareness of their guilt, which becomes more anguished when they are together.

Wilkins becomes a drunkard and Ellinor desperately tries to conceal his infirmities and his crime from others. Ironically, it was this concern for her father that caused Mr. Livingstone, a young clergyman staying in the area, to fall in love with her. One evening at dinner, to divert attention from her father's blurred speech and changed demeanor, she had chatted brilliantly with Livingstone and riveted his attention. However, if Livingstone dreamed of making Ellinor his wife, Ralph Corbet is unconsciously seeking a plausible reason for ridding himself of her.

Corbet is not presented unsympathetically. There are excellent reasons why he would not wish to make Ellinor his wife. His father disapproves. He is painfully aware of Wilkins's failings and suspects that he will be unable to provide a marriage settlement, but above all, Ellinor's rustic charms are beginning to pall on a young man grown accustomed to the bright conversation of London.

It had become difficult for Ralph to contract his mind to her small domestic interests, and she had little else to talk to him about, now that he responded but curtly to all her questions about himself, and was weary of professing a love which he was ceasing to feel, in all the passionate nothings which usually make up so much of lovers' talk. The books she had been reading were old classics whose place in literature no longer admitted of keen discussion; the poor whom she cared for were all very well in their way; and, if they could have been brought in to illustrate a theory, hearing about them might have been of some use; but, as it was, it was simply tiresome to hear day after day of Betty Palmer's rheumatism and Mrs. Kay's baby's fits. There was no talking politics with her, because she was so ignorant that she always agreed with everything he said, (chap. 9)

It is with considerable relief that Corbet makes the occasion of a quarrel with the drunken Wilkins the reason for his breaking the engagement. He is further convinced of his good judgment when Wilkins dies, leaving Ellinor almost penniless—aspiring young barristers cannot afford poor wives.

Ellinor realizes that she must rent Ford Bank, the family home, but how can she leave Dunster's grave? Miss Monro, her old governess, has taken a residence in East Chester Close, but the care of the grave remains her despairing concern. It is Dixon who remains as custodian of the crime. Over the years her fears subside and she suggests that Dixon should make his home with her. The old man shakes his head and mutters that:

At times I dream, or it comes into my head as I lie awake with the rheumatics, that some one is there, digging; or that I hear 'em cutting down the tree; and then I get up and look out of the loft window—you'll mind the window over the stables, as looks into the garden, all covered over wi' the leaves of the jargonelle pear-tree?

The years pass and Corbet becomes an eminent barrister, making a brilliant marriage and being appointed to the bench. Livingstone has just been made a canon at East Chester Cathedral when Ellinor takes a holiday in Rome to restore her failing health. It is there in the middle of the Carnival that she learns that Dixon has been arrested for murder or manslaughter. The railroad navvies had uncovered Dunster's body and, alongside the corpse, a horse-lancet with the name of Abraham Dixon engraved on the handle.

With Livingstone's help, Ellinor returns to England and determines to go alone to London and plead Dixon's innocence to Judge Corbet. The interview between the two is compounded of alternating moods of regret and satisfaction on Corbet's part: relief that he did not involve himself with the daughter of a murderer and regret that he had refused to marry this quiet, disarming woman instead of his imperious and demanding wife. The story concludes with the chagrin of Judge Corbet and the content of Ellinor, who marries Canon Livingstone and takes Dixon into her home:

Those who pass through the village of Bromham, and pause to look over the laurel-hedge that separates the rectory garden from the road, may often see, on summer days, an old, old man, sitting in a wicker-chair, out upon the lawn. He leans upon his stick, and seldom raises his bent head; but for all that, his eyes are on a level with the two little fairy children who come to him in all their small joys and sorrows, and who learnt to lisp his name almost as soon as they did that of their father and mother, (chap. 16)

There is a remarkable social and moral logic to this story, which accords with Gaskell's conviction that there is no such quality as absolute evil. Wilkins is a murderer but his crime is made to seem a natural response to psychological pressures that he is only dimly aware of himself. He is never conscious, for example, that Dunster has come to embody for him all the injustice of his position in the county and the snubs he has received over the years from a thick-headed gentry, men who were inferior to him in every way save that of birth.

So often in Gaskell's short stories, a clumsy expression or lurch into sentimentality can be forgiven because she has the courage to take up questions of considerable moral and social complexity. Even the most lachrymose Sunday School story is enlivened by a sudden pungent thought and glint of humor that comes from an "unenchanted eye" looking at people and events.

Many of Gaskell's failings in the short stories and novellas can be attributed to the requirements of serial publication and editors who wanted to package prose like boxes of biscuits. Because Gaskell's fiction was moved less by well-designed plots than by the natural progress of thought, she was often at a loss to fill a required space with the appropriate number of words. The Victorian novelists have their descendants in the writers of television soap operas who know the precise amount of emotion to be squeezed into each episode. It is this lack of competence that accounts for the number of "baggy monsters" that found their way into print under her name. My Lady Ludlow, first published in Household Words in 1858, later became the central story in the Round the Sofa volumes of 1859, and it cannot be fairly argued that there is any reason for publication in this form except the demand for a book and the advice of the ubiquitous Dickens.

If a counterpart for her stories is found then one must look across the Channel to George Sand, evoking the truth of feeling in her provincial stories. In both writers commonplace events have a luminosity and moral dimension that set them between narrative and poetry. These qualities define Cousin Phillis and redeem the most discursive stretches of My Lady Ludlow, where Gaskell pauses and makes the change between two estate managers an occasion for discussion of time and memory:

And Mr. Horner was dead, and Captain James reigned in his stead. Good, steady, severe, silent Mr. Horner with his clock-like regularity, and his snuff-coloured clothes, and silver buckles! I have often wondered which one misses most when they are dead and gone—the bright creatures full of life, who are hither and thither and everywhere, so that no one can reckon upon their coming and going, with whom stillness and the long quiet of the grave, seems utterly irreconcilable, so full are they of vivid motion and passion—or the slow, serious people, whose movements, nay, whose very words, seem to go by clockwork; who never appear much to affect the course of our life while they are with us, but whose methodical ways show themselves, when they are gone, to have been intertwined with our very roots of daily existence. I think I miss these last the most, although I may have loved the former best. Captain James never was to me what Mr. Horner was, though the latter had hardly exchanged a dozen words with me at the day of his death.

For Sand, it is the heart that speaks to the essential nature of reality, and only through feeling can the world be known. Wordsworth's romantic thesis is tempered in Sand by a consistent irony of vision, whereas for Gaskell romance is always fortified by a tough Mancunian shrewdness. If she is only rarely profound, she is never silly. Nonetheless, both writers believed that the world can only be experienced and understood by the responsive heart, and the source for this belief is, of course, Wordsworth.