Wives and Daughters Read Free Page A

was, as Henry James allows, a “lady-novelist,” but one who excites every “reader’s very warmest admiration.” Our contemporary concern for deemphasizing an author’s gender when evaluating art, while often simultaneously emphasizing who is meant to consume it, was not shared by the mid-Victorians. James’s review reflects this, as does the considerable attention Gaskell gave to what we now call the “packaging” of her first novel. Like her good friend Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell had sought a male pseudonym to use for her first novel, Mary Barton:ATale of Manchester Life (1848), even though her publisher had suggested that the novel would be more popular if it was known to be the work of “a lady” (Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, p. 183). The account that Jenny Uglow, one of Gaskell’s biog raphers, gives of the publishing process suggests that Gaskell was invested in the commercial presentation of the novel; Uglow speculates that Gaskell “may have felt that a man’s name (like the proposed title, “John Barton”) would make the readers take the politics of the book more seriously.” Gaskell agonized about the choice of the male pseudonym until she chose—too late—the name “Stephen Berwick” (Uglow, pp. 187—188). In the end, Mary Barton was published anonymously, but, having caused considerable controversy, the identity of its author was soon known and celebrated. Henceforth, Elizabeth Gaskell would publish her novels, if not quite in her own name, under her married appellation of “Mrs. Gaskell.”
    To read Wives and Daughters today is to forget perhaps the extraordinary opportunity that writing fiction presented to Victorian women. The book trade during the period was a profoundly commercial enterprise. And unlike in earlier periods, the arts were divorced from either university ties or elite patronage, which particularly benefited women writers. Writing literature was one of the very few professional pursuits open to women in Victorian society. Elizabeth Gaskell was connected to a broad literary community of women, many of whom were her friends and some of whom she actively promoted with her own connections. This circle, which included Charlotte Brontë, Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Caroline Clive, reads like a list of the most popular and important female literary figures of the day. And yet it would be a mistake to assume that a novel such as Wives and Daughters is solely the province of the female reader. Our contemporary perspective might look to the title Wives and Daughters and think the book is directed to the female reader, even though the title was most likely influenced by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). The conventional assumption about novels, and romance plots and domestic narratives in particular, is that women make up their primary audience; indeed, the stereotype of the woman who reads too many novels, and becomes sick from “gorging” on too many delicious reads, originated in the eighteenth century and circulated widely in the Victorian period. And yet a host of descriptions, anecdotal evidence, figures from circulating libraries, and surveys about book ownership and reading habits suggest that men were as avid novel readers as women. And indeed what, exactly, in the novel marks it out for the female reader? As will become apparent as you read the novel and the following discussion, the work of Elizabeth Gaskell cannot be slotted into contemporary demographic readerships, but rather is inviting— as Henry James himself said—to anyone interested in an “ ‘everyday story’ ... in an everyday style.”
     
    It is important to understand that the novel—as a distinct art form or literary genre—has not always been with us. Moreover, in some sense, it required the emergence of a middle-class society: one in which there was enough leisure