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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell," readers are invited to explore a rich tapestry of narratives that reflect the intricacies of Victorian society. Gaskell's literary style marries realism with a poignant emotional depth, showcasing her acute observations of class disparities, gender roles, and the lives of those on society's margins. Within this collection, readers will encounter a variety of themes, from domestic life to social critique, all articulated through her distinctive voice that seamlessly weaves moral insight with empathy, inviting reflection on the human condition. Elizabeth Gaskell, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, was profoundly influenced by her own experiences in the industrial North of England. Born to a Unitarian family and later marrying a minister, her environment shaped her commitment to social issues and her desire to illuminate the struggles of working-class individuals, particularly women. Gaskell's background as a mother and a member of a progressive community undoubtedly informed her compelling portrayals of women's experiences and societal challenges, establishing her as a pioneering female voice in literature. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in delving into the nuances of 19th-century literature, as well as those seeking engaging narratives that advocate for social justice and gender equality. Gaskell's stories not only offer a window into the past but also resonate with contemporary issues, making them timeless and essential reading. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers the complete corpus of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s shorter prose—short stories, novellas, tales, and sketches—organized in groupings familiar from nineteenth-century editions, including Round the Sofa, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, The Grey Woman and Other Tales, Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, Right at Last and Other Tales, The Old Nurse’s Story and Other Tales, and a section of Other Stories. The purpose is to present, in one place, the full range of Gaskell’s artistry beyond the novels, tracing how she explored character, community, history, and the uncanny within concise forms that reward close reading and reveal her versatility.
While the core is fiction, the collection also includes travel sketches, local histories, and antiquarian essays—such as Clopton House, Crowley Castle, and Some Passages from the History of the Chomley Family—alongside social observations, seasonal pieces, and ghost stories. Readers will encounter novellas like Cousin Phillis, domestic tales, historical reconstructions, and fragments that illuminate her process. The volume concludes with a biographical appreciation, Mrs. Gaskell and Knutsford by George A. Payne, which, though not by Gaskell, provides contemporary context for the places and relationships that informed her shorter writings and complements the imaginative record assembled here.
Gaskell’s shorter works grew from the lively culture of nineteenth-century magazines and Christmas numbers, which encouraged brevity, variety, and experiment. Frames such as Round the Sofa assemble diverse narratives into a sociable setting, while an individual novella like Cousin Phillis shows how she sustains intimacy and breadth within limited space. Preserving these clusters echoes the rhythms of their first readers’ experience, where domestic scenes, moral debate, and tales of wonder sat alongside essays and reportage. The effect is a mosaic: distinct pieces that speak to one another across tones and topics, offering a panoramic view of Victorian life.
A strong current of domestic and social realism runs through many narratives, attentive to households shaped by work, marriage, and conscience. Lizzie Leigh, Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras, Hand and Heart, Bessy’s Troubles at Home, and The Manchester Marriage consider the pressures of respectability and the claims of charity and justice in towns and villages. Gaskell’s distinctive contribution is her patient observation of everyday negotiations—between employers and servants, parents and children, friends and neighbors—rendered with sympathy for human fallibility. In the shorter form she distills dilemmas without sensationalism, allowing quiet decisions and small kindnesses to carry lasting ethical weight.
Gaskell’s historical imagination gives the collection breadth. Lois the Witch transports readers to seventeenth-century New England at a moment of mounting apprehension, while An Accursed Race adopts a documentary tone to recount the marginalization of a persecuted group. Traits and Stories of the Huguenots and local studies such as Clopton House and Crowley Castle reveal her interest in family records, regional memory, and the way private manuscripts, buildings, and inherited tales can anchor narrative truth. These works bridge fiction and history, showing how the past persists in traces that continue to shape identity, belief, and community feeling.
Her mastery of the Gothic and the uncanny yields some of the collection’s most resonant pieces. The Old Nurse’s Story, The Grey Woman, Curious if True, Disappearances, Two Fragments of Ghost Stories, and The Ghost in the Garden Room explore secrecy, estrangement, and the hauntings of conscience within domestic interiors and remote landscapes. Gaskell’s supernatural often relies on atmosphere and moral implication rather than elaborate contrivance. By placing the inexplicable within familiar social worlds, she uses the Gothic as a lens for fear, memory, and responsibility, revealing how unspoken histories press upon the present with unsettling insistence.
Balancing darker moods is an observant comedy of manners. Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, Company Manners, Christmas Storms and Sunshine, The Squire’s Story, and The Cage at Cranford turn on provincial sociability, civic rituals, misunderstandings, and reconciliation. Humor arises from voice and situation—a medical man’s entanglements, neighbors’ festive rivalries, a swaggering visitor—rather than from caricature. These tales share the tone and milieu associated with Cranford, valuing tact, kindness, and communal bonds. Their wit is grounded in sympathy, making foibles occasions for generosity, and offering a restorative counterpoint to the collection’s tragedies and mysteries.
Rural lives, labor, and landscape receive sustained attention in narratives shaped by ballad-like simplicity and moral gravity. Half a Life-Time Ago, The Half-Brothers, The Doom of the Griffiths, The Heart of John Middleton, and Morton Hall, as well as the pastoral world of Cousin Phillis, draw strength from fields, moors, and farmyards where choices echo across generations. Regional idioms and cadences give voice to communities whose courage and grief are registered without condescension. Fate and character meet in weathered places, and the natural world becomes both witness and participant in human hope, error, endurance, and reconciliation.
Formally, Gaskell thrives on varied vantage points and frames. Round the Sofa convenes multiple storytellers; confessional elements shape Mr. Harrison’s Confessions; an antiquarian voice governs historical sketches; servant- and nurse-narrators lend intimacy to tales of the uncanny. Shifts in register—from colloquial anecdote to measured moral analysis—allow her to stage debate without didacticism. Reported speech, remembered scenes, and embedded documents carry narrative authority, honoring oral tradition and local record. This polyphony reflects the social nature of storytelling, asking readers to weigh motives and evidence, and demonstrating how truth in human affairs is often communal and composite.
An ethical imagination—attentive to gender, class, belief, and belonging—animates the whole. Women’s work, domestic governance, and friendship are central, as are the vulnerabilities of outsiders, whether marked by poverty, rumor, or faith. My Lady Ludlow, The Shah’s English Gardener, My French Master, Six Weeks at Heppenheim, and Martha Preston register cross-cultural encounters and subtle negotiations of power and courtesy. Gaskell resists simple judgments, revealing how affection, pride, prejudice, and necessity intertwine. Even where characters falter, their dignity is honored, and the stories invite readers to practice the sympathy they depict.
Gaskell’s prose is clear and flexible, attentive to the specific look of rooms, the cadence of speech, and the habits of work. She moves easily from a comic aside to spare description, and her plots advance through plausible circumstance rather than contrivance. Taken together, these shorter works confirm why her reputation rests not only on novels but also on mastery of the tale. They remain significant for range and tact: domestic and historical, comic and Gothic, metropolitan and provincial, always grounded in humane curiosity. The collection showcases a writer refining her craft while engaging the moral life of her age.
The inclusion of Mrs. Gaskell and Knutsford by George A. Payne provides a fitting coda, offering a contemporaneous perspective on Gaskell’s connections with Knutsford and complementing stories that draw on local memory and civic character. As a whole, the volume presents a complete panorama of her shorter prose, preserving the original groupings that highlight tonal variety and formal experiment. It invites readers to encounter, in compact compass, the qualities that have secured Gaskell’s standing: sympathetic intelligence, historical sense, narrative poise, and the ability to find significance in ordinary lives and in the mysteries that shadow them.
Author Biography
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist, short-story writer, and biographer whose work helped define mid-Victorian realism. Writing across social-problem fiction, domestic comedy, Gothic tales, and literary biography, she bridged industrial themes with intimate portraits of provincial life. Her novels Mary Barton, North and South, Cranford, and Wives and Daughters are widely read for their nuanced engagement with class relations, gender constraints, and community. Publishing in leading periodicals and in volume form, she reached a broad readership that included both reform-minded contemporaries and lovers of gentle satire. Today she is regarded as a central figure in the 19th-century English novel.
Born in England and raised partly in the Cheshire town that later inspired Cranford, Gaskell received a conventional education for a middle-class woman of her time and became an avid, omnivorous reader. Her adult life in the industrial North, in close contact with working people and civic debate, shaped her moral imagination. The Unitarian intellectual milieu in which she moved encouraged social inquiry, tolerance, and practical philanthropy, informing both her subjects and tone. Early reading in Romantic and realist authors, as well as observation of provincial manners, supplied material she would rework into fiction that combined sympathy with careful, often humorous, detail.
Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, appeared in the late 1840s and immediately marked her as a major new voice. Set among artisans and mill workers, it brought the conditions of industrial Manchester into the literary mainstream and sparked debate for its frank depiction of hardship and unrest. The success led to invitations to contribute to popular magazines; several works, including Cranford in the early 1850s and North and South in the mid-1850s, were serialized before publication in book form. Ruth, published in the early 1850s, drew controversy for its treatment of a fallen woman, but also won admirers for its moral seriousness.
Gaskell became a regular contributor to the periodical culture of the day, notably to Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, whose editorial demands helped shape pacing and structure in her serial fiction. Her range extended beyond the novel to tales of the uncanny, such as The Old Nurse’s Story, and, crucially, to biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in the late 1850s, remains a landmark of Victorian life-writing. It combined documentary research with the novelist’s sympathy, drawing praise for its portrait while also provoking legal and factual challenges that required revisions in later editions.
From the late 1850s into the 1860s she continued to diversify her forms. Sylvia’s Lovers offered a historical canvas set against coastal life and wartime impressment, while shorter fictions such as Lois the Witch and A Dark Night’s Work explored psychological tension and moral choice. Cousin Phillis, a novella of rural and industrial change, displayed her refined control of tone and intricate observation. Her final and most expansive project, Wives and Daughters, appeared serially in the mid-1860s and was left unfinished at her death, yet it is often cited as the culmination of her art for breadth and characterisation.
Across her oeuvre, Gaskell balanced a reformist impulse with narrative tact, advocating sympathy, dialogue, and incremental change over polemic. She is celebrated for melding social observation with the textures of everyday life—dialect, routine, local customs—while allowing multiple perspectives to coexist. Contemporary reception often divided along these lines: some critics objected to perceived partiality toward labor or to frankness about women’s vulnerability, while many praised her comic gift, especially in Cranford, and her measured view of industrial conflict in North and South. Her command of structure, framing devices, and flexible third-person narration made her a key practitioner of Victorian realism.
Gaskell died in 1865, leaving an unfinished masterpiece and a body of work that continues to attract general readers and scholars. Her fiction is studied for its insight into industrialization, regional cultures, and the entanglements of gender, class, and conscience. Renewed interest through modern editions and adaptations has highlighted the breadth of her achievement, from Gothic tales to domestic comedy. She now stands alongside her contemporaries as a major voice in the 19th-century English novel, valued for humane intelligence and an ability to render communities in motion. Readers today encounter her as both a social chronicler and a subtle artist.
Historical Context
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) wrote across a Britain transformed by industry, reform, and empire. Born in Chelsea and raised in Knutsford, Cheshire, she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell in 1832 and settled in Manchester, where the social realities of the cotton city shaped her imagination. From Mary Barton (1848) to the late Cornhill serial Cousin Phillis (1863–64), her shorter fiction continually returned to the textures of provincial life, religious dissent, and the pressures of modernity. She died suddenly on 12 November 1865 at Holybourne, Hampshire, and was buried at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford, leaving a body of tales spanning the 1840s to the mid-1860s.
Manchester’s explosive growth under the factory system furnishes the social climate for many stories about masters and men, household economies, and civic responsibility. The city’s history—Peterloo (1819), the Anti–Corn Law League led by Richard Cobden and John Bright (1838–46), Chartism’s peaks (1839–48), and the Ten Hours Act (1847)—formed the political weather of Gaskell’s maturity. Cotton’s global supply chains tied Lancashire to the American South and India, while wage fluctuations and strikes exposed fragile family structures. Scenes of mill courts, counting-houses, and weaving rooms in these tales register industrial capitalism’s human costs and the moral energies it provoked in mid-century activism and philanthropy.
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act reshaped local relief, pushing the destitute toward the workhouse and stigmatizing unmarried mothers, a regime repeatedly interrogated in Gaskell’s fiction. District visiting societies, soup kitchens, and ragged schools arose as countermeasures, often staffed by Nonconformist women. Debates over outdoor relief versus deterrent institutions, and the 1842 sanitary inquiries of Edwin Chadwick, form an essential backdrop to narratives about illegitimacy, desertion, and redemption. Stories centering on seamstresses, servants, and casual laborers reflect both the letter and the spirit of the new poor law, dramatizing parish surveillance, bastardy clauses, and the uneasy boundary between charity and social control.
Gaskell’s short fiction belongs to the golden age of the Victorian periodical. Charles Dickens launched Household Words in 1850 and All the Year Round in 1859, creating markets for serial tales, reportage, and Christmas numbers. Gaskell debuted in magazines in the late 1840s and contributed regularly to Dickens’s ventures, adopting collaborative frames and seasonal storytelling that culminated in volumes such as Round the Sofa (1859). William Makepeace Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine, founded in 1860 by George Smith, provided a later, genteel venue. Print culture’s rhythms—weekly deadlines, festive extras, and reader correspondence—shaped her pacing, framed narratives, and attention to topical controversies without subordinating them to mere journalism.
A leading practitioner of Victorian regionalism, Gaskell mapped the social and linguistic textures of Cheshire, Lancashire, and the borderlands with Yorkshire and the Lake District. Knutsford supplied the model for Cranford’s genteel townscape, while farmsteads, fells, and moors stage dramas of endurance and kinship in rural tales. The north’s mixed economy—hand-loom weaving lingering beside mechanized mills—set transitional worlds where custom met innovation. Careful use of dialect, topography, and local crafts, together with attention to town-meeting politics and chapel life, grounded her storytelling. Railway embankments and surveyors’ camps began to cut across these landscapes, introducing engineers and investors to parishes wary of change.
Victorian fascination with folklore, medievalism, and the Gothic revival infused Gaskell’s excursions into the supernatural and the uncanny. The ghost-story vogue tied to Christmas numbers, together with the spread of mesmerism, table-turning (1852), and spiritualism after the Fox sisters (1848), gave cultural currency to narratives of haunted houses, family curses, and ancestral secrets. Continental settings—Rhine valleys, Alsace, and the Vosges—offered foreign scenery for banditti, convents, and mountain passes, while English and Welsh manors supplied crumbling galleries and locked chambers. Gaskell balanced Unitarian rationalism with a storyteller’s relish for legend, using apparitions to critique pride, secrecy, and the persistence of historical wrongs.
Medicine and public health modernized rapidly during Gaskell’s lifetime, furnishing plots and professions for her characters. The Apothecaries Act (1815) and the rise of general practice elevated the village surgeon’s status, while anesthesia (ether in 1846, chloroform in 1847) altered surgery and childbirth. Cholera waves in 1832, 1848–49, and 1853–54, along with John Snow’s epidemiology and the 1848 Public Health Act, made sanitation and contagion vivid public concerns. Her comic-earnest medical tales reflect negotiations among apothecaries, physicians, and midwives, village rumor and professional secrecy, as well as the moral theatre of the sickroom where communities measure competence, compassion, and authority.
Questions of women’s legal identity and domestic power run through Gaskell’s shorter fiction. Under coverture, a wife’s property merged with her husband’s; reforms were piecemeal before the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882). The Infant Custody Act (1839) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) began to open the civil courts to family disputes. Stories of presumed death, bigamy by mistake, guardianship conflicts, and the policing of female sexuality echo real cases and newspaper debates. Gaskell’s plots expose the precariousness of women dependent on male respectability, while also honoring female networks—neighborhood committees, sewing circles, and aunts—capable of pragmatic care, judgment, and moral rescue.
Religious dissent and toleration frame much of the moral world in these tales. The Gaskells’ Cross Street Chapel in Manchester connected them to Unitarian networks led by figures such as James Martineau. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship revealed Nonconformist strength outside the established Church, even as Tractarian controversies stirred Anglican parishes. Gaskell’s historical interests reach back to the Huguenot diaspora after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, linking French Protestant refugees with English industry and craft traditions. Her American-set witchcraft narrative returns to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, invoking Cotton Mather and Puritan jurisprudence to probe conscience, credulity, and persecution.
Transnational circuits—of people, plants, and capital—thread Gaskell’s world. Lancashire’s mills depended on slave-grown American cotton until British abolition (1807, 1833) shifted the moral calculus, and the U.S. Civil War (1861–65) triggered the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Manchester philanthropists organized relief, making global politics felt in local kitchens. Botanical imperialism flourished through Kew Gardens under William Jackson Hooker (director 1841–65), plant hunters like Robert Fortune, and exchanges that reached Persia during the Anglo-Persian War (1856–57). Continental travels to France and the German states inform sketches of schools, inns, and customs, while letters, remittances, and emigrant tales register Britain’s porous borders and restless mobility.
Domestic service structured Victorian households and many of Gaskell’s plots. By the 1851 census, female domestic servants formed Britain’s largest single occupational group for women. Nursemaids, housekeepers, gardeners, and cooks occupy pivotal narrative positions as mediators of memory and guardians of reputation. Their oral testimony frames stories, their loyalty or resentment steers outcomes, and their vulnerabilities expose class discipline within the home. Apprenticeships, hiring fairs, and reference letters reveal a labor market governed by trust and surveillance. The intimacy of service also opens rooms where secrets, wills, and heirlooms lie, binding servants to the fates of gentry families and aspiring middle-class households.
Victorian legal modernity, policing, and sensational reading shape Gaskell’s handling of mystery and crime. The Metropolitan Police were created in 1829; county forces followed in 1856. Newspaper courts and broadsides spread case lore, while sensation fiction in the 1860s normalized bigamy plots, hidden heirs, and forged identities. Gaskell draws on these materials yet tempers melodrama with moral scrutiny, attentive to the inertia of custom and the ambiguities of testimony. Historical essays on stigmatized groups and vanished persons engage mid-century anthropology and ethnology, critiquing pseudoscience and inherited prejudice while registering the era’s appetite for classification, statistics, and the narrative seductions of the case history.
Communications and infrastructure revolutionized narrative possibilities. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830; by the 1850s engineers and navvies were remaking Britain’s horizon, imposing railway time and new geographies of work. The Uniform Penny Post (1840) and the electric telegraph hastened confessions, proposals, and reconciliations—or miscarried them. Surveyors’ chains, embankments, and canal cuts mark the interface of agrarian rhythms with capital-intensive projects, bringing speculative bubbles and technological awe. Gaskell’s stories exploit delays and arrivals, the moral weight of letters and ledgers, and the shock of speed in communities calibrated to parish bells and market days rather than to timetables.
Gaskell wrote within dense literary networks. Dickens commissioned, edited, and sometimes reshaped her contributions to Household Words and All the Year Round, encouraging seasonal frames, collaborative numbers, and topicality. William Makepeace Thackeray welcomed her to Cornhill’s respectable middle-class audience. Her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), published by George Smith, provoked libel threats from figures including the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, requiring revisions in 1857–58 and sharpening her sense of reputation’s fragility. Correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe connected Manchester dissent to transatlantic abolitionism and domestic ideology. These affiliations honed Gaskell’s tactful realism, mixing pathos, satire, and documentary texture across rural sketches and urban novellas.
Education and self-improvement institutions underwrite many scenes of aspiration and gentility. Mechanics’ Institutes and the Manchester Athenaeum (opened 1837, with Prince Albert’s 1843 visit) advanced adult learning and respectable leisure for clerks and artisans. Debates over public-school privilege culminated in the Clarendon Commission (1861–64), later leading to the Public Schools Act (1868), a context for observations about Eton and elite formation. Language lessons, governess posts, and music practice rooms reflect the feminized curriculum of middling families. Lending libraries such as Mudie’s Select Library (from 1842) and family magazines shaped taste and moral tone, creating a readership for stories blending instruction, piety, and amusement.
War and geopolitics cast shadows even on provincial plots. The Crimean War (1854–56) generated patriotic volunteering, hospital reform narratives, and a press culture of eyewitness reporting by W. H. Russell. The Volunteer Rifle Movement of 1859 and invasion scares tuned villages to drilling and rumor. The Revolutions of 1848, the rise of Napoleon III, and cross-Channel travel made France at once neighborly and unsettling in travel sketches and Continental romances. Local heroism—lifeboat crews, moorland rescues, and churchyard bravery—echoed national narratives of sacrifice. Gaskell harnessed these currents to explore courage, duty, and the costs of obedience beyond the parade ground and the battlefield.
Antiquarian curiosity and the mid-Victorian cult of heritage animate Gaskell’s historical sketches and house tales. Learned societies such as the Surtees (1834) and Camden (1838) popularized editing family papers and parish records, while the Gothic Revival and archaeological digs renewed interest in manorial lineages and ruins. Gaskell mines country-house archives, epitaphs, and oral chronicles to reconstruct episodes of feuds, dowries, and spectral warnings. Frames like Round the Sofa foreground sociable storytelling, where letters and relics prompt collective remembrance. By weaving local legend with document and rumor, she measures modern progress against the tenacity of place memory and the ethical claims of the dead.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
An editorial overview that situates Gaskell’s short fiction in its Victorian context, highlighting her recurrent concerns with class, gender, faith, and the Gothic.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
A brief biographical sketch of the author’s life and career, noting her contribution to social-problem fiction and domestic realism.
Short Stories & Novellas (section)
A comprehensive gathering of Gaskell’s shorter works spanning social realism, domestic comedy, historical sketches, and Gothic tales.
Round the Sofa (collection and frame)
A gentle frame narrative in which convalescents share stories around a sofa, linking diverse tales of memory, morality, and mystery.
My Lady Ludlow
Through a dependent gentlewoman’s recollections, a benevolent but conservative aristocrat confronts social change in her parish, especially debates over educating the poor.
An Accursed Race
A pseudo-historical sketch about the Cagots, examining how superstition and prejudice stigmatize an entire people.
The Doom of the Griffiths
A Welsh family’s proud lineage is shadowed by a hereditary curse, with passions across generations converging in tragedy.
Half a Life-Time Ago
A farm woman’s youthful hopes are altered by duty and a perilous rescue, tracing how one decision redirects the course of a life.
The Poor Clare
A Gothic tale in which a rash curse unleashes a haunting double upon an innocent young woman, provoking a desperate quest for atonement.
The Half-Brothers
Two boys of unequal favor are tested on the fells during a winter ordeal, revealing quiet courage and the ties of kinship.
Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (collection)
Stories of tender feeling and quiet humor set against social and industrial change, moving from courtship confusions to acts of unshowy heroism.
Cousin Phillis
A young engineer narrates his cousin’s awakening feelings and first heartbreak in a rural minister’s household amid the stir of modern industry.
Company Manners
A light social sketch about visiting and etiquette among the aspiring middle classes, where appearances unsettle sincerity.
Mr. Harrison’s Confessions
A newly arrived provincial doctor recounts comic misunderstandings and small-town gossip that entangle his practice and courtship.
The Sexton’s Hero
An elderly sexton recalls unassuming bravery during a storm, quietly redefining what it means to be a hero.
The Grey Woman and Other Tales (collection)
Gothic adventures and continental sketches mingle with domestic and seasonal pieces, balancing suspense with humane observation.
The Grey Woman
After marrying a charming stranger, a young woman discovers his violent secret and flees across Europe in disguise, pursued by relentless danger.
Curious if True
A whimsical, dreamlike encounter with figures who seem to be descendants of fairy-tale characters blurs the line between history and fancy.
Six Weeks at Heppenheim
A gently humorous travel sketch that observes manners, landscapes, and fleeting acquaintances in a German town.
Libbie Marsh's Three Eras
The life of a poor seamstress unfolds through three turning points shaped by kindness, perseverance, and quiet love.
Christmas Storms and Sunshine
Rival households divided by politics are pushed into neighborly compassion during a holiday crisis, melting enmity into goodwill.
Hand and Heart
A Manchester tale that champions honest labor and humble virtue as paths to respectability and affection.
Bessy's Troubles at Home
A young domestic grapples with family hardship and duty, learning resilience within constrained choices.
Disappearances
An essay-like series of cases where people vanish without trace, weighing anecdote, rumor, and the unsettling gaps in ordinary life.
Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (collection)
Social and historical pieces that probe forgiveness, legend, and steadfast character, from industrial Manchester to folk-haunted coasts.
Lizzie Leigh
A mother searches the industrial city for her disgraced daughter, seeking reconciliation and a chance at redemption.
The Well of Pen-Mortha
A local legend entwines with a quiet romance and a long-buried wrong at a mysterious well.
The Heart of John Middleton
A steadfast artisan endures betrayal and hardship, measuring strength not by success but by constancy.
Traits and Stories of the Huguenots
Historical vignettes depict the trials and courage of French Protestants under persecution.
Morton Hall
A country-house tale of inheritance and reputation, where past promises cast long shadows on present attachments.
My French Master
A fond, comic recollection of an exacting language tutor and the lessons learned beyond grammar.
The Squire’s Story
A flamboyant newcomer unsettles a quiet parish with hints of scandal and mystery, leaving a long-lived local legend.
Right at Last and Other Tales (collection)
Domestic drama and moral testing meet witch-trial tragedy and rustic noir, exploring truth, loyalty, and fear.
Right at Last
A marital misunderstanding and a concealed misstep test trust and courage, leading to a hard-won reconciliation.
The Manchester Marriage
Believing herself a widow, a woman remarries—until the presumed-dead husband returns, forcing painful choices about law, duty, and love.
Lois the Witch
An English orphan in seventeenth-century New England is ensnared by Salem’s witch-hunt hysteria, where fear turns piety into cruelty.
The Crooked Branch
Devoted parents face the devastation of a favored son’s downfall in a rustic tale shadowed by guilt and the uncanny.
The Old Nurse's Story and Other Tales (collection)
Signature Gothic atmospherics and antiquarian sketches, from a haunted mansion to fragmentary specters and travel oddities.
The Old Nurse's Story
A nurse recounts a child’s winter at a remote mansion, where organ music and apparitions expose a tragic family secret.
Clopton House
An antiquarian sketch mingling local history with hints of ghosts around a venerable Warwickshire house.
Crowley Castle
A brief evocation of a ruined stronghold, touching on memory, lineage, and the allure of old stones.
Two Fragments of Ghost Stories
Two unfinished eerie pieces that suggest specters and unease rather than fully narrate them.
The Shah's English Gardener
An English gardener in Persia navigates cultural misunderstandings and courtly whims with practical wit.
Other Stories (section)
Miscellaneous sketches and tales, from character portraits and school visits to Cranford asides and ghostly rooms.
Martha Preston
A portrait of a young woman whose quiet determination guides her through family duty and moral testing.
The Deserted Mansion
An atmospheric sketch of an abandoned house and the whispers it inspires.
Uncle Peter
A genial character study of a well-meaning relative whose past holds a modest surprise.
A Visit to Eton
A light reminiscence of school traditions and youthful spirit observed during a trip to Eton.
The Cage at Cranford
An addendum to Cranford’s gentle world, where a small domestic incident stirs the town’s kindly gossip.
Some Passages from the History of the Chomley Family
A mock-chronicle tracing a family’s fortunes across generations, wryly noting pride, piety, and folly.
The Ghost in the Garden Room
A Victorian ghost piece centered on a secluded room and the lingering sorrow it holds.
Biography (section)
Biographical and local studies illuminating Gaskell’s life and settings.
Mrs. Gaskell and Knutsford by George A. Payne
A local biographical essay linking Gaskell’s life to the Cheshire town of Knutsford, highlighting places and people that shaped her fiction.
The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell
Introduction
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN (1810–1865), English novelist and biographer, was born on the 29th of September 1810 in Lindsay Row, Chelsea, London, since destroyed to make way for Cheyne Walk. Her father, William Stevenson (1772–1829), came from Berwick-on-Tweed, and had been successively Unitarian minister, farmer, boarding-house keeper for students at Edinburgh, editor of the Scots Magazine, and contributor to the Edinburgh Review, before he received the post of Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, which he held until his death. His first wife, Elizabeth Holland, was Mrs Gaskell's mother. She was a Holland of Sandiebridge, Knutsford, Cheshire, in which county the family name had long been and is still of great account. Mrs Stevenson died a month after her daughter was born, and the babe was carried into Cheshire to Knutsford to be adopted by her aunt, Mrs Lumb. Thus her childhood was spent in the pleasant environment that she has idealized in Cranford. At fifteen years of age she went to a boarding-school at Stratford-on-Avon, kept by Miss Byerley, where she.remained until her seventeenth year. Then came occasional visits to London to see her father and his second wife, and after her father's death in 1829 to her uncle, Swinton Holland. Two winters seem to have been spent in Newcastle-on-Tyne in the family of William Turner, a Unitarian minister, and a third in Edinburgh. On the 30th of August 1832 she was married in the parish church of Knutsford to William Gaskeil, minister of the Unitarian chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and the author of many treatises and sermons in support of his own religious denomination. Mr Gaskell held the chair of English history and literature in Manchester New College.
Henceforth Mrs Gaskell's life belonged to Manchester. She and her husband lived first in Dover Street, then in Rumford Street, and finally in 1850 at 84 Plymouth Grove. Her literary life began with poetry, She and her husband aspired to emulate George Crabbe and write the annals of the Manchester poor, One poetic "Sketch," which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for January 1837, seems to have been the only outcome of' this ambition. Henceforth, while in perfect union in all else, husband and wife were to go their separate literary ways, Mrs Gaskell to become a successful novelist, whose books were to live side by side with those of greater masters, Mr Gaskell to be a distinguished Unitarian divine, whose sermons, lectures and hymns are now all but forgotten. In her earlier married life Mrs Gaskell was mainly occupied with domestic duties--she had seven children--and philanthropic work among the poor. Her first published prose effort was probably a letter that she addressed to William Howitt on hearing that he contemplated a volume entitled Visits to Remarkable Places. She then told the legend of Clopton Hall, Warwickshire, as she had heard it in schooldays, and Howitt incorporated the letter in that book, which was published in 1840. Serious authorship, however, does not seem to have been commenced until four or five years later. In 1844 Mr and Mrs Gaskell visited North Wales, where their only son "Willie" died of scarlet fever at the age of ten months, and it was, it is said, to distract Mrs Gaskell from her sorrow that her husband suggested a long work of fiction, and Mary Barton was begun. There were earlier short .stories in Howitt's Journal, where "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" and "The Sexton's Hero" appeared in 1847. But it was Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life that laid the foundation of Mrs Gaskell's literary career. It was completed in 1847 and offered to a publisher who returned it unread. It was then sent to Chapman & Hall, who retained the manuscript for a year without reading it or communicating with the author. A reminder, however, led to its being sought for, considered and accepted, the publishers agreeing to pay the author £100 for the copyright. It was published anonymously in two volumes in 1848. This story had a wide popularity, and its author secured first the praise and then the friendship of Carlyle, Landor and Dickens. Dickens indeed asked her in o to become a Contributor to his new magazine Household Words, and here the whole of Cranford appeared at intervals from December 1851 to May 1853, exclusive of One sketch, reprinted in the "World's Classics" edition (1907), that was published in All the Year Round for November 1863. Earlier than this, indeed, for the very first number of Household Words she had written "Lizzie Leigh." Mrs Gaskell's second book,however, was The Moorland Cottage, a dainty little volume that appeared at Christmas 1850 with illustrations by Birket Foster. In the Christmas number of Household Words for 1853 appeared "The Squire's Story," reprinted in Lizzie Leigh and other Tales in I865. In 1853 appeared another long novel, Ruth, and the incomparable Cranford. This last--now the most popular of her books--is an idyll of village life, largely inspired by girlish memories of Knutsford and its people. In Ruth, which first appeared in three volumes, Mrs Gaskell turned to a delicate treatment of a girl's betrayal and her subsequent rescue. Once more we are introduced to Knutsford, thinly disguised, and to the little Unitarian chapel in that town where the author had worshipped in early years. In 1855 North and South was published. It had previously appeared.serially in Household Words. Then came--in 1857-- the Life of Charlotte Bronte, in two volumes. Miss Bronte, who had enjoyed the friendship of Mrs Gaskell and had exchanged visits, died in March 1855. Two years earlier she had begged her publishers to postpone the issue of her own novel Villette in order that her friend's Ruth should not suffer. This biography, by its vivid presentation of the sad; melancholy and indeed tragic story of the three Bronte sisters, greatly widened the interest in their writings and gave its author a considerable place among English biographers. But much matter was contained in the first and second editions that was withdrawn from the third. Certain statements made by the writer as to the school of Charlotte Bronte's infancy, an identification of the "Lowood" of Jane Eyre with the existing school, and the acceptance of the story of Bramwell Bronte's ruin having been caused by the woman in whose house he had lived as tutor, brought threats of libel actions. Apologies were published, and the third edition of the book was modified, as Mrs Gaskell declares, by "another hand." The book in any case remains one of the best biographies in the language. An introduction by Mrs Gaskell to the then popular novel, Mabel Vaughan, was also included in her work of this year 1857, but no further book was published by her until 1859, when, under the title of Round the Sofa, she collected many of her contributions to periodical literature. Round the Sofa appeared in two volumes, the first containing only "My Lady Ludlow," the second five short stories. These stories reappeared the same year in one volume as My Lady Ludlow and other Tales. In the next year 1860 appeared yet another volume of short stories, entitled Right at Last and other Tales. The title story had appeared two years earlier in Household Words as" The Sin of a Father." In 1862 Mrs Gaskell wrote a preface to a little book by Colonel Vecchi, translated from the Italian--Garibaldi and Caprera, and in 1863 she published her last long novel, Sylvia's Lovers, dedicated "to My dear Husband by her who best knows his Value." After this we have--in 1863--a one-volume story, A Dark Night's Work, and in the same year Cousin Phyllis and other Tales appeared. Reprinted short stories from All the Year Round, Cornhill Magazine, and other publications, tend to lengthen the number of books published by Mrs Gaskell during her lifetime. The Grey Woman and other Tales appeared in 1865.
Mrs Gaskell died on the 12th of November 1865 at Holyburn, Alton, Hampshire, in a house she had just purchased with the profits of her writings as a present for her husband. She was buried in the little graveyard of the Knutsford Unitarian church. Her unfinished novel Wives and Daughters was published in two volumes in 1866.
Mrs Gaskell has enjoyed an ever gaining popularity since her death. Cranford has been published in a hundred forms and with many illustrators. It is unanimously accepted as a classic. Scarcely less recognition is awarded to the Life of Charlotte Bronte, which is in every library. The many volumes of novels and stories seemed of less secure permanence until the falling in of their copyrights revealed the fact that a dozen publishers thought them worth reprinting. The most complete editions, however, are the "Knutsford Edition," edited with introductions. by A. W. Ward, in eight volumes (Smith, Elder), and the "World's Classics" edition, edited by Clement Shorter, in 10 volumes (Henry Froude 1908).
There is no biography of Mrs Gaskell, she having forbidden the publication of any of her letters. See, however, the biographical introduction to the "Knutsford" Mary Barton by A. W. Ward; the Letters of Charles Dickens; Women Writers, by C. J. Hamilton, second series; H. B. Stowe's Life and Letters, edited by Annie Fields; Autobiography of Mrs Fletcher; Mrs Gaskell and Knutsford, by G. A. Payne; Cranford, with a preface by Anne Thackeray Ritchie; Écrivains modernes de l'Angleterre, by mile Montgut.
(C.K.S)
Short Stories & Novellas
Round the Sofa
Elizabeth Gaskell
Round the Sofa
Long ago I was placed by my parents under the medical treatment of a certain Mr Dawson, a surgeon in Edinburgh, who had obtained a reputation for the cure of a particular class of diseases. I was sent with my governess into lodgings near his house, in the Old Town. I was to combine lessons from the excellent Edinburgh masters, with the medicines and exercises needed for my indisposition. It was at first rather dreary to leave my brothers and sisters, and to give up our merry out of doors life with our country home, for dull lodgings, with only poor grave Miss Duncan for a companion; and to exchange our romps in the garden and rambles through the fields for stiff walks in the streets, the decorum of which obliged me to tie my bonnet strings neatly, and put on my shawl with some regard to straightness.
The evenings were the worst. It was autumn, and of course they daily grew longer: they were long enough, I am sure, when we first settled down in those grey and drab lodgings. For, you must know, my father and mother were not rich, and there were a great many of us, and the medical expenses to be incurred by my being placed under Mr Dawson’s care were expected to be considerable; therefore, one great point in our search after lodgings was economy. My father, who was too true a gentleman to feel false shame, had named this necessity for cheapness to Mr Dawson; and in return, Mr Dawson had told him of those at No. 6 Cromer Street, in which we were finally settled. The house belonged to an old man, at one time a tutor to young men preparing for the University, in which capacity he had become known to Mr Dawson. But his pupils had dropped off; and when we went to lodge with him, I imagine that his principal support was derived from a few occasional lessons which he gave, and from letting the rooms that we took, a drawing room opening into a bedroom, out of which a smaller chamber led. His daughter was his housekeeper: a son, whom we never saw, supposed to be leading the same life that his father had done before him, only we never saw or heard of any pupils; and there was one hard-working, honest little Scottish maiden, square, stumpy, neat, and plain, who might have been any age from eighteen to forty.
Looking back on the household now, there was perhaps much to admire in their quiet endurance of decent poverty; but at this time, their poverty grated against many of my tastes, for I could not recognise the fact, that in a town the simple graces of fresh flowers, clean white muslin curtains, pretty bright chintzes, all cost money, which is saved by the adoption of dust coloured moreen, and mud coloured carpets. There was not a penny spent on mere elegance in that room; yet there was everything considered necessary to comfort: but after all, such mere pretences of comfort! a hard, slippery, black horse hair sofa, which was no place of rest; an old piano, serving as a sideboard; a grate, narrowed by an inner supplement, till it hardly held a handful of the small coal which could scarcely ever be stirred up into a genial blaze. But there were two evils worse than even this coldness and bareness of the rooms: one was that we were provided with a latchkey, which allowed us to open the front door whenever we came home from a walk, and go upstairs without meeting any face of welcome, or hearing the sound of a human voice in the apparently deserted house – Mr Mackenzie piqued himself on the noiselessness of his establishment; and the other, which might almost seem to neutralise the first, was the danger we were always exposed to on going out, of the old man – sly, miserly, and intelligent – popping out upon us from his room, close to the left hand of the door, with some civility which we learned to distrust as a mere pretext for extorting more money, yet which it was difficult to refuse: such as the offer of any books out of his library, a great temptation, for we could see into the shelf lined room; but just as we were on the point of yielding, there was a hint of the “consideration” to be expected for the loan of books of so much higher a class than any to be obtained at the circulating library, which made us suddenly draw back. Another time he came out of his den to offer us written cards, to distribute among our acquaintance, on which he undertook to teach the very things I was to learn; but I would rather have been the most ignorant woman that ever lived than tried to learn anything from that old fox in breeches. When we had declined all his proposals, he went apparently into dudgeon. Once when we had forgotten our latchkey we rang in vain for many times at the door, seeing our landlord standing all the time at the window to the right, looking out of it in an absent and philosophical state of mind, from which no signs and gestures of ours could arouse him.
The women of the household were far better, and more really respectable, though even on them poverty had laid her heavy left hand, instead of her blessing right. Miss Mackenzie kept us as short in our food as she decently could – we paid so much a week for our board, be it observed; and if one day we had less appetite than another our meals were docked to the smaller standard, until Miss Duncan ventured to remonstrate. The sturdy maid-of-all-work was scrupulously honest, but looked discontented, and scarcely vouchsafed us thanks, when on leaving we gave her what Mrs Dawson had told us would be considered handsome in most lodgings. I do not believe Phenice ever received wages from the Mackenzies.
But that dear Mrs Dawson! The mention of her comes into my mind like the bright sunshine into our dingy little drawing room came on those days; – as a sweet scent of violets greets the sorrowful passer among the woodlands.
Mrs Dawson was not Mr Dawson’s wife, for he was a bachelor. She was his crippled sister, an old maid, who had, what she called, taken her brevet rank.
After we had been about a fortnight in Edinburgh, Mr Dawson said, in a sort of half doubtful manner to Miss Duncan –
“My sister bids me say, that every Monday evening a few friends come in to sit round her sofa for an hour or so, – some before going to gayer parties – and that if you and Miss Greatorex would like a little change, she would only be too glad to see you. Any time from seven to eight tonight; and I must add my injunctions, both for her sake, and for that of my little patient’s, here, that you leave at nine o’clock. After all, I do not know if you will care to come; but Margaret bade me ask you;” and he glanced up suspiciously and sharply at us. If either of us had felt the slightest reluctance, however well disguised by manner, to accept this invitation, I am sure he would have at once detected our feelings, and withdrawn it; so jealous and chary was he of anything pertaining to the appreciation of this beloved sister.
But if it had been to spend an evening at the dentist’s, I believe I should have welcomed the invitation, so weary was I of the monotony of the nights in our lodgings; and as for Miss Duncan, an invitation to tea was of itself a pure and unmixed honour, and one to be accepted with all becoming form and gratitude: so Mr Dawson’s sharp glances over his spectacles failed to detect anything but the truest pleasure, and he went on.
“You’ll find it very dull, I dare say. Only a few old fogies like myself, and one or two good sweet young women: I never know who’ll come. Margaret is obliged to lie in a darkened room – only half-lighted I mean, – because her eyes are weak, – oh, it will be very stupid, I dare say: don’t thank me till you’ve been once and tried it, and then if you like it, your best thanks will be to come again every Monday, from half-past seven to nine, you know. Goodbye, goodbye.”
Hitherto I had never been out to a party of grown-up people; and no court ball to a London young lady could seem more redolent of honour and pleasure than this Monday evening to me.
Dressed out in new stiff book-muslin, made up to my throat, – a frock which had seemed to me and my sisters the height of earthly grandeur and finery – Alice, our old nurse, had been making it at home, in contemplation of the possibility of such an event during my stay in Edinburgh, but which had then appeared to me a robe too lovely and angelic to be ever worn short of heaven – I went with Miss Duncan to Mr Dawson’s at the appointed time. We entered through one small lofty room, perhaps I ought to call it an antechamber, for the house was old-fashioned, and stately and grand, the large square drawing room, into the centre of which Mrs Dawson’s sofa was drawn. Behind her a little was placed a table with a great cluster candlestick upon it, bearing seven or eight wax lights; and that was all the light in the room, which looked to me very vast and indistinct after our pinched up apartment at the Mackenzie’s. Mrs Dawson must have been sixty; and yet her face looked very soft and smooth and childlike. Her hair was quite grey: it would have looked white but for the snowiness of her cap, and satin ribbon. She was wrapped in a kind of dressing gown of French grey merino: the furniture of the room was deep rose colour, and white and gold, – the paper which covered the walls was Indian, beginning low down with a profusion of tropical leaves and birds and insects, and gradually diminishing in richness of detail till at the top it ended in the most delicate tendrils and most filmy insects.
Mr Dawson had acquired much riches in his profession, and his house gave one this impression. In the corners of the rooms were great jars of Eastern china, filled with flower-leaves and spices; and in the middle of all this was placed the sofa, which poor Margaret Dawson passed whole days, and months, and years, without the power of moving by herself. By-and-by Mrs Dawson’s maid brought in tea and macaroons for us, and a little cup of milk and water and a biscuit for her. Then the door opened. We had come very early, and in came Edinburgh professors, Edinburgh beauties, and celebrities, all on their way to some other gayer and later party, but coming first to see Mrs Dawson, and tell her their bon mots, or their interests, or their plans. By each learned man, by each lovely girl, she was treated as a dear friend, who knew something more about their own individual selves, independent of their reputation and general society character, than any one else.
It was very brilliant and very dazzling, and gave enough to think about and wonder about for many days.
Monday after Monday we went, stationary, silent; what could we find to say to any one but Mrs Margaret herself? Winter passed, summer was coming, still I was ailing, and weary of my life; but still Mr Dawson gave hopes of my ultimate recovery. My father and mother came and went; but they could not stay long, they had so many claims upon them. Mrs Margaret Dawson had become my dear friend, although, perhaps, I had never exchanged as many words with her as I had with Miss Mackenzie, but then with Mrs Dawson every word was a pearl or a diamond.
People began to drop off from Edinburgh, only a few were left, and I am not sure if our Monday evenings were not all the pleasanter.
There was Mr Sperano, the Italian exile, banished even from France, where he had long resided, and now teaching Italian with meek diligence in the northern city; there was Mr Preston, the Westmoreland squire, or, as he preferred to be called, statesman, whose wife had come to Edinburgh for the education of their numerous family, and who, whenever her husband had come over on one of his occasional visits, was only too glad to accompany him to Mrs Dawson’s Monday evenings, he and the invalid lady having been friends from long ago. These and ourselves kept steady visitors, and enjoyed ourselves all the more from having the more of Mrs Dawson’s society.
One evening I had brought the little stool close to her sofa, and was caressing her thin white hand, when the thought came into my head and out I spoke it.
“Tell me, dear Mrs Dawson,” said I, “how long you have been in Edinburgh; you do not speak Scotch, and Mr Dawson says he is not Scotch.”
“No, I am Lancashire – Liverpool born,” said she, smiling. “Don’t you hear it in my broad tongue?”
“I hear something different to other people, but I like it because it is just you; is that Lancashire?”
“I dare say it is; for, though I am sure Lady Ludlow took pains enough to correct me in my younger days, I never could get rightly over the accent.”
“Lady Ludlow,” said I, “what had she to do with you? I heard you talking about her to Lady Madeline Stuart the first evening I ever came here; you and she seemed so fond of Lady Ludlow; who is she?”
“She is dead, my child; dead long ago.”
I felt sorry I had spoken about her, Mrs Dawson looked so grave and sad. I suppose she perceived my sorrow, for she went on and said – “My dear, I like to talk and to think of Lady Ludlow: she was my true, kind friend and benefactress for many years; ask me what you like about her, and do not think you give me pain.”
I grew bold at this.
“Will you tell me all about her, then, please, Mrs Dawson?”
“Nay,” said she, smiling, “that would be too long a story. Here are Signor Sperano, and Miss Duncan, and Mr and Mrs Preston are coming tonight, Mr Preston told me; how would they like to hear an old world story which, after all, would be no story at all, neither beginning, nor middle, nor end, only a bundle of recollections?”
“If you speak of me, madame,” said Signor Sperano, “I can only say you do me one great honour by recounting in my presence anything about any person that has ever interested you.”
Miss Duncan tried to say something of the same kind. In the middle of her confused speech, Mr and Mrs Preston came in. I sprang up; I went to meet them.
“Oh,” said I, “Mrs Dawson is just going to tell us all about Lady Ludlow, and a great deal more, only she is afraid it won’t interest anybody: do say you would like to hear it!”
Mrs Dawson smiled at me, and in reply to their urgency she promised to tell us all about Lady Ludlow, on condition that each one of us should, after she had ended, narrate something interesting, which we had either heard, or which had fallen within our own experience. We all promised willingly, and then gathered round her sofa to hear what she could tell us about my Lady Ludlow.
My Lady Ludlow
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six inside, and making a two days’ journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month; – but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! they may all be improvements, – I dare say they are; but you will never meet with a Lady Ludlow in these days.
I will try and tell you about her. It is no story: it has, as I said, neither beginning, middle, nor end.
