Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  Nell Stevens

  MRS GASKELL AND ME

  Two Women, Two Love Stories,

  Two Centuries Apart

  PICADOR

  For Amanda, Grace & 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.

  Contents

  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

  Thanks—

  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 cre
am 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.

  I’m on edge. If it wasn’t the sniffer driving me crazy, it would be something else.

  I am going to Paris to visit my friend Max, who has recently moved to a top-floor apartment in the second arrondissement, and with whom I have been pathetically, persistently in love for the past year. We were in the same fiction workshop at Boston University, and at the beginning of the summer, we graduated; I haven’t seen him since. It is autumn now, and our cohort has been scattered across the globe: some to New York, some to LA; one girl is teaching English in Turkey, another is in Romania on a research fellowship. I have returned home to London to begin a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century literature; Max has moved to Paris to write.

  The London I have left behind is at its loveliest: crisp and leafy, just beginning to turn mulchy, and the drizzle-grey texture of the streets and buildings is delightful to me after a year abroad. Ahead, on the other side of the tunnel: Paris, an apartment in a tall, old building near Les Halles, and inside it, the man I love – the man who has made it abundantly clear on repeated occasions that he does not love me back.

  I am on my way to Paris to make a declaration.


  Evidence to suggest that Max is not in love with me:

  1. When, early on in our year at Boston University, I forwarded an email advertising a poetry reading to him, suggesting we go together, he replied the day after the event, apologizing for ‘only having seen this just now’.

  2. When I was standing in line to get a coffee at the campus cafe before class, he walked in, saw me, turned around and left.

  3. Once, towards the end of the year, he gave me a lift home and as we drew up outside my house I took a deep breath and said, tremblingly, ‘I need to tell you something.’ He said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘I like you,’ and he said, ‘Well, I like you too,’ and patted me on the knee.

  4. When, after the knee-patting incident, I worried that the phrase ‘I like you’ was open to too broad a spectrum of interpretation and followed up with an email saying, ‘Just to clarify, what I was trying to say is that I have had feelings for you all year,’ there was a long silence, and then, eventually, he suggested, in a one-line message, that we meet for dinner the next day at a place called Lineage in Coolidge Corner. At the restaurant, we talked about everything we could think of except my email. We got through starters, mains, dessert, coffee: no mention. Afterwards, we went out into torrential rain, and he lent me his coat and we linked arms and walked, bent over, through the downpour to his car. I could feel the heat of him pressing against me, and by the time we reached the parking lot we were both completely drenched and my cheap, worn-out shoes were disintegrating around my feet, and instead of getting into the car he stood by it and looked at me and I thought, This is it. He’s going to kiss me now, and I waited and the rain thudded onto our faces and then he turned and opened the passenger-side door. I hesitated, and then got in. Max dashed round and ducked into the driver’s seat, but, once there, he didn’t start the engine, just sat and stared at his hands on the steering wheel for a very long time. ‘I’m not looking for a relationship right now,’ he said. And then he drove me home.