The Victorian and the Romantic
ALSO BY NELL STEVENS
Bleaker House
Copyright © 2018 by Nell Stevens
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Cover illustrations of women by Bradley Clark
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Stevens, Nell, 1985– author.
Title: The Victorian and the romantic : a memoir, a love story, and a friendship across time / Nell Stevens.
Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056102 (print) | LCCN 2018006000 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385543507 (hardcover) | 9780385543514 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Stevens, Nell, 1985– | Authors, English—21st century—Biography. | Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810–1865. | Authors, English—19th century—Biography. | Fiction—Authorship. | Interpersonal relations. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century.
Classification: LCC PR6119.T478 (ebook) | LCC PR6119.T478 Z46 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.92 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056102
Ebook ISBN 9780385543514
v5.3.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Nell Stevens
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Disclaimer
Part One: Body Study
1855: What You Had
2013: Eurostar
1857: Manchester to Rome
2013: Rue d’Aboukir
2013: “I Never Get Over to You”: Unreachable Americas and the Idea of Home in the Letters and Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell
1857: Goldfinch
2013: Q&A
2013: Basic Accounting for Ph.D. Students
1853: The Casting of The Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Harriet Hosmer
2013: Body Study
1857: Via Sant’Isidoro
2013: Shakespeare and Company
1857: Mr. Charles Eliot Norton’s Guide to Rome and Its Environs
Part Two: Saliva Study
2015: Procrastination: Three Techniques
1857: Hornets’ Nest
2015: Loon Mountain
2015: Upgrade Examination
1857: The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition
2015: 560 Million Years After the Big Bang
1858: Séance
2015: Pig–Human Relations in Jude the Obscure
2015: Saliva Study
1857: The First of Many
2015: Winning
2015: People Who Fit Your Criteria
Part Three: Sleep Study
2015: Treehouse
1859: Sylvia’s Lovers
2015: Sleep Study
2015: Great News
1862: A Woman Whom Everybody Loves
2016: Tornado
1878: William’s Party
2016: Accoutrements of Womanhood: Three Observations
2016: Critic
2016: Viva
1865: Mortis
2017: Three Types of Ending for This Book
The End: Mrs. Gaskell Goes to America
Acknowledgments
Permissions
About the Author
For Amanda, Grace and Claudia
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
DISCLAIMER
“Do you mind the law of libel?” Mrs. Gaskell wrote to her publisher, when she was working on her biography of Charlotte Brontë in 1856. “I have three people I want to libel.”
I have no people I want to libel. I have changed names, scenes, details, motivations and personalities. Every word has been filtered through the distortions of my memory, bias and efforts to tell a story. This is as true of the historical material as it is of the sections about my own life: studies, letters and texts excerpted here are not always faithfully quoted. This is a work of imagination.
Two separate parties threatened legal action against Mrs. Gaskell when The Life of Charlotte Brontë came out in 1857. I want to be like her in many ways, but not that one.
PART ONE
BODY STUDY
1855
WHAT YOU HAD
1. A husband
When you wanted to talk about your husband, you talked about sermons. Sermons, you said, bored you. You sometimes called yourself a “sermon-hater.” In the front row of the Cross Street Chapel, you’d fidget, your mind would wander, as your husband, the minister, preached. You mused about the people in the pews around you—about their lives and secrets, the things that they were thinking about instead of listening to your husband—and when you came back to yourself you found you had missed almost nothing, he was still speaking, the congregation was still waiting in silence, coughing and sighing, crossing and uncrossing their legs.
Sermons, of course, were meant for good; were meant to help you, support you, reform you. And yet, all the same, they were dull, dull, dull, and what you really wanted was to feel something, do something: to be moved, to move, to love.
Your husband: the minister, Mr. Gaskell. Sequestered in his study in the middle of your house, in the middle of newly industrial Manchester, square in the middle of the nineteenth century, he was good to the core. He cautioned you when you were reckless or impulsive. He corrected the grammar of your letters before you sent them. He helped you, supported you, reformed you.
And you, Mrs. Gaskell, waited outside his study door; you raised a hand to knock, to see if today he would come to the parlour and sit with you and the girls. You wondered whether today, perhaps, you might find in your husband a conversation rather than a sermon. A faint tap, quiet enough that he could pretend, if he wanted, not to hear. You pressed your ear to the wood and listened until it was clear there would be no reply, and then you stood there far longer than you needed to, resting your cheek against the cool surface.
You were always lucky, Mrs. Gaskell; you were always grateful for what you had, and yet, all the same, you were restless.
2. A career
Sometimes days on end went by in a blur of what you called Home Life—meals and clothes and correspondence, hosting and visiting—and by the end of it you were tired and grumpy, but not tired in the way you wanted to be. You lay awake, exhausted, your mind alert. Beside you your sleeping husband was eerily still.
His body, his very breathing, was moderate, controlled. You imagined moving away, back to the village where you lived as a child, or even somewhere entirely foreign, where nobody knew you, and you could say you were unmarried and had no responsibilities.
You told stories all the time, to friends, to yourself; you exaggerated in letters, made up white lies that entertained you and seemed to entertain others too; you gossiped unapologetically. None of this was enough. There were stories left over. Lying awake in the night beside the motionless Mr. Gaskell, they overwhelmed you, and yet, you craved them.
You began to keep a diary. It was about the children, you said, to people who asked: a record of their development. But it was about you too—you couldn’t keep yourself and your stories out of it—and soon you moved on to articles about culture and country life, and sent them, sheepishly, to magazines. They appeared in print. Next, you published short fiction using a pseudonym: quiet, sad tales about ordinary people like the ones in church, about whose private lives you couldn’t help but wonder. And then you wrote a novel called Mary Barton, a great big pounding book about the people around you in the city, the ones you saw crammed into factories and warehouses and tenements, whose griefs you could only, and did, imagine. It became the sort of book that people bought and reviewed and talked about, and all of a sudden you had a career.
This thing you had now, this career, was all your own. It was a portal. It drew you away from Manchester, away from Mr. Gaskell, to new places and new acquaintances: painters, philosophers, critics. You became friends with Florence Nightingale. You became friends with Charlotte Brontë. At a party in London you met Charles Dickens, who complimented you on Mary Barton and you thought, for the rest of the night, over and over: Charles Dickens has read my book. Charles Dickens has read my book. Charles Dickens. You paid no attention to the earnest, impressed men and women who spoke to you after that. Your mind was fully occupied: Charles Dickens has read my book.
You went home. You wrote more books.
3. A letter
By the time you opened it, the letter was four days old. You had been in Paris and were still giddy from the memory of it. There had been parties in your honour at the house of Madame Mohl, and there had been cream cakes (never enough, but still) and best of all there had been Americans everywhere, intriguing and exotic. You had talked and talked and name-dropped more than you knew you should, and in particular you had boasted of how, thanks to you, your cherished friend Charlotte Brontë was happily married and soon to be a mother. Dear Charlotte: you had encouraged and cajoled her towards accepting the proposal of a smart, earnest curate called Mr. Nicholls; she had been reluctant; her father had disapproved; you had known better and helped her see that after all the hardship and grief of her life, a drop of domesticity was exactly what was needed. You had not, then, observed any conflict between your personal feelings about Mr. Gaskell, and your advice to Charlotte regarding Mr. Nicholls.
In Paris, people had listened to you. People had praised you. They had given you cake and sherry. In Paris, there had been all your favourite things at once.
At home, the letter was waiting for you, halfway down a stack of correspondence that had amassed from your weeks away. You worked your way down the pile, scanning for gossip. A girl you had known as a child was having marital problems after running up extravagant debts. A prominent writer was entangled in controversy over whether he was the true author of his works. The daughter of a distant cousin was turning twenty-one and considered pretty, would soon be engaged. And then, there it was: a note to say that your friend, Charlotte Brontë, was dead.
4. A project
In place of a friend: a book. You began to think of writing The Life of Charlotte Brontë almost at once; it was an outlet for the sharp energy of your grief, and a distraction. You fired off letters to her father, her husband, her publisher, requesting every detail of her life and death, hoping, perhaps, to be asked to write a biography. And eventually the request came from old Mr. Brontë: Finding that a great many scribblers, as well as some clever and truthful writers, have published articles, in Newspapers, and tracts—respecting my Dear Daughter Charlotte, since her death—and seeing that many things that have been stated, are true, but more false…He wanted an official biography to set the record straight. You seem to me to be the best qualified for doing what I wish should be done, he said. Could my Daughter speak from the tomb, I feel certain, she would laud our choice.
Mrs. Gaskell: at the ready. Mrs. Gaskell: pen aloft and in possession of a new project.
You had always loved ghost stories, after all, and Charlotte, even in life, was nothing if not ghostly. She had paced between the corners of her dim little parlour, muttering to herself after dark. Her siblings, one after the other, had slid before her into the grave: Maria, Elizabeth, Branwell, Emily, Anne. And the deathly expanses of the moors stretching away from the parsonage in Haworth: you had walked them with her, and felt for yourself the chill of the fog, the suck of the boggy ground underfoot. It was a real-life ghost story waiting to be told, waiting for you to tell it. The Life of Charlotte Brontë would practically write itself.
But Charlotte had been brash, too, and usually at the wrong times. She had written big and tricky books that made faraway readers in London raise their eyebrows. There was a whiff of sex and lust and impulsiveness about Charlotte and her stories. She was not, exactly, proper. Ghostly, yes, but also, often, a little too alive.
For this you had never judged her. People wrote outraged nonsense about your books, too. You knew what it was to be a woman with a career, to be a woman who wrote about everything in life, even the unpleasant things. You knew, too, the use of a husband, of children, to persuade your critics that while your books might be wild and alarming, you yourself were well mannered, dutiful and tame. And so you had clucked and mothered her, as you did everyone, and for her protection and her happiness you had done your best to drag her onto the terra firma of domestic life. Despite your personal antipathy to sermons, you had thought that marriage to Mr. Nicholls the Curate would make Charlotte happy. You really had.
You had encouraged her to marry, to keep her safe: irony of ironies that her pregnancy killed her. Did you begin, at once, to blame yourself? Was the project of writing her biography doomed from the start by your own uneasy conscience?
The Life of Charlotte Brontë took two years to write and more pain and worry than you could possibly have anticipated. There were so many people to insult: the terrible master of the school that caused the deaths of two of the Brontë girls, and which Charlotte described in the opening chapters of Jane Eyre; the married woman who had seduced and ruined Branwell Brontë; the Belgian teacher after whom Charlotte had pined so openly and so embarrassingly. You sent frantic letters to your publisher enquiring about libel laws. There were so many people, you said, whom you wanted to libel.
And everyone, all the time, was offended. If you suggested the story was one way, someone would write and correct you. If you suggested it differently, someone else complained, would swamp your desk with letters detailing the true facts of the matter. You owed it to your dead friend to tell the truth, but the truth was evasive and slippery and fought back tooth and nail from the page.
Mr. Gaskell’s sermons were unwavering on the subject. They made honesty sound so simple. How easy it was, they implied, to live honestly. But you were not Mr. Gaskell. You were not a minister. You were a writer, and to you, everything was complicated.
5. A plan
The Life of Charlotte Brontë was no fun to write, and everybody was angry about it, even before it was published, and you found that when you did manage to fall asleep you’d wake, heart racing and sweat prickling along your breastbone. Your mind was full of new, competing visions of how it might all go wrong, how your attempt to write a book about your friend might end with the disgrace not only of you and your family but of her and hers.
Your nerves were overactive, but perceptive, too. You must have seen the trouble coming, because, amid the chaos of writing and letters from your publisher and letters from Mr. Brontë, the general noise of Manchester life and the sermons, the demands of daughters and friends, the idea came to you that when the work was done and the book was finally out in the world, you would escape the reviews and go, instead, to Rome.
2013
EUROSTAR
There is a sniffer on the 4 p.m. train from London St. Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord. From my window seat with a view of the black wall of the Channel Tunnel, I hear it: the rumble and hiss of the wheels on the tracks, the giggles of a child playing peek-a-boo with its mother, the murmur of conversation at the far end of the carriage, and then, sporadically, that loud, wet sniff. I crane my head around to get a look at the culprit: a man in a suit who is frowning at his laptop over an inflamed nose. If he does it again, I decide, I will offer him a tissue, passive-aggressively. But then of course he does do it again, and all I do is glare, which he doesn’t notice. I drum my fingers against the tray table in front of me, which must be at least as annoying to people nearby. I jiggle my knee up and down.