John O’Connor (1830-1889), Pentonville — looking west (1884)
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Eight Wednesdays, mid-day, 11:50 to 1:15 pm
Tallwood, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dates: Classes start Mar 23rd; last class May 11, 2016.
Dr Ellen Moody
Description of Course
Gaskell wrote introspective domestic fiction, strange melodramatic gothics, political historical fiction, an influential passionate and great biography of Charlotte Bronte, and novels of social protest, including disability, emigration and prostitution, set across the landscape of Victorian industrial cities, the more rural genteel south and London. Born to Unitarians, she became a clergyman’s wife, wrote fiction from her earliest years, published in magazines, and lived for many years in Manchester. Her tale of this city, North and South, which extends to colonial naval adventures abroad and Spain, centers on a strike and lockout, on religious controversies, military injustice, the psychic pain of displacement, regional and class conflicts all aligned with the education of a heroine and her experience of love. We will read her book in the context of Gaskell as a 19th century woman of letters writing in a number of contemporary kinds through reading a few of short stories and her journalism written earlier than this novel and towards the end of her life: “The Old Nurse’s Story (ghost story);” from Cranford, “A love affair of Long Ago/A Visit to an Old Bachelor,” and “Old Letters/Peter”; “Lois the Witch (based on the Salem witch trials); “An Italian Institution” (about La Camorra); and “French Life,” Chapter 3 (a journal diar of her time in Paris, which includes a historical case history of a 16th century woman, abused and murdered by her husband and his brothers, the Marquise de Gange).
Frank Holl (1845-1888), Song of the Shirt
Required Texts:
Elizabeth Gaskell, “A love Affair of Long Ago/A Visit to An Old Bachelor,” “Old Letters/Peter.” Cranford Stories are at:
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Cranford.html#3
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Cranford.html#5 These are also reprinted in any edition of Cranford. The best (because complete) is Cranford, ed. E. P Watson, intro and notes Charlotte Mitchell. Oxford UP, 1998.
—————–. “The Old Nurse’s Tale”: https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Nurse.html, , and various anthologies of ghost and gothic stories.
—————–. North and South, ed. intro. Elizabeth Ingram. Penguin, 1995. The recent Oxford classics edition by Angus Easson is also excellent. If you want to understand North and South and its world, you can’t do better than the Norton Critical edition by Alan Shelton.
—————–. “Lois the Witch:” https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Lois.html,also reprinted in Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, ed, intro. Angus Eason. Oxford Classics, 1981, and available as a separate text (a thin novella), intro by Jenny Uglow ISBN 1-84391-049-7.
——————-. “An Italian Institution:”
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Italian.html
——————-. “French Life,” Chapter 3:
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Life.html#III
I suggest you bookmark the Elizabeth Gaskell site for all texts, information, biography, publications about her, pictures too:
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Gaskell.html
Medium range shot of Thornton’s factory
Anna Maxwell Martin as Bessy Higgins (from Sandy Welch’s North and South, BBC 2004)
Format: Study group meetings will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.
Schedule:
Mar 23rd: Introduction: Gaskell’s life, career, read for this day, the three Cranford stories; “Love Affair of Long Ago” and “A Visit to an Old Bachelor” “Old Letters/Peter.”
Mar 30th: Read for this day, “Old Nurse’s Tale” and North and South, Chapters 1-6 (“Haste to the Wedding” to “”Farewell”) I will show 3 brief clips from Heidi Thomas’s Cranford Chronicles.
Apr 6th: North and South, Chapters 7-16 (“New Faces and New Scenes” to “What Is a Strike?”); read also Jo Pryke, “The Treatment of Political Economy in North and South, The Gaskell Society Journal 4 (1990). Online.
Apr 13th: North and South, Chapters 17-27 (“Likes and Dislikes” to “Fruit Piece”); read also Rosemarie Bodenheimer, North and South: A Permanent State of Change,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34:3 (1979):281-301; Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. “‘Taught by Death What Life Should Be’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Representation of Death in North and South,” Studies in the Novel 32.2 (Summer 2000): 165-184.
Apr 20th: North and South, Chapters 28 – 36 (“Comfort in Sorrow” to “Union Not Always Strength”). Michael D. Lewis, “Mutiny in the Public Sphere Debating Naval Power in Parliament, the Press, and Gaskell’s North and South, Victorian Review, 36:1 (2010):89-113. We see clips from Welch’s North and South too.
Apr 27th: North and South, Chapters 37-44 (“Looking south” to “Ease Not Peace”); read also Julia Sun Joo-Lee, “The Return of the “Unnative”: The Transnational Politics of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 61:4 (2007):449-478; John Pikoulis, North and South: Varieties of Love and Power,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 6 (1976):176-193
May 4th: North and South, Chapters 45-52 (“Not All a Dream” to “Pack Clouds Away”), and “An Italian Institution”. Dorice Williams Elliot, “The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell’s North and South,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49:1 (1994):21-49; Stepfanie Markovits, North and South, East and West, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59:4 (2005):463-493
May 11th: Read for this day, Lois the Witch, and “French Life, Chapter 3.” From Jenny Uglow’s biography of Gaskell, 5 pages on Lois the Witch. If I can find a suitable clip from Andrew Davies’s Wives and Daughters, I’ll end with that.
From Wives and Daughters, the death of Osborne Hamley (Part 4, Tom Hollander, Michael Gambon, Justine Waddell)
The films, & a few books (any essays will be sent by attachment):
North and South. Dir. Brian Perceval. Screenplay: Sandy Welch. Producer: Kate Bartlett. Featuring Richard Armitage, Daniela Denby-Ashe, Brendan Coyle, Anna Maxwell Martin. BBC, 2004.
Wives and Daughters. Dir. Nicholas Renson. Screenplay: Andrew Davies. Producer: Sue Birtwistle. Featuring: Bill Patterson, Ian Carmichael, Francesca Annis, Justice Waddell, Keeley Hawes, Tom Hollander, Michael Gambon. BBC, 1999.
Cranford: The collection (Chronicles). Dir. Simon Curtis. Screenplay: Heidi Thomas. Produced. Sue Birtwhistle. Featuring: Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Michael Gambon, Philip Glenister, Francesca Annis, Lesley Manville (among many others). BBC, 2010.
Bonaparte, Felicia. The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon. Charlottesville: Univ Press of Va, 1992.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. If you like any of the movies, you might want to add My Lady Ludow and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (a novella and story woven into Cranford Chronicles); I also recommend her Mary Barton, Life of Charlotte Bronte (one of the great biographies which shaped our view Bronte, strongly recommended as a wonderful read) and Wives and Daughters.
Harman, Barbara. The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England. Charlottesville: Univ Press of Virginia, 1998.
Hughes, Linda K. and Michael Lund. Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work. Charlottesville: Univ Press of Va, 1999.
Matus, Jill, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge UP, 2007.
Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Steinbach, Susie. Understanding the Victorians: Culture and Society in 19th century Britain. London: Routledge, 2012. There is no better book for understanding intimate and public aspects of Victorian life.
Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993. The best single book on Gaskell to date in the way Uglow combines biography, literary criticism,and a political and feminist vision.
See also Gaskell’s house, 84 Plymouth Grove, Manchester: nowadays a museum
William Parrott (1813-69) The Great Eastern Under Construction at Millwall on the Isle of Dogs in 1857
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
I have saved the syllabus for future reference, Ellen. I want to investigate some of the elements.
Clare
She is so wonderful, Clare. She helps me to sustain myself. Of course she’s not presented properly or maybe adequately most of the time.
Well, whatever do you expect, my friend? She was a woman writing at a time when there was no real respect for a woman writer. I’d like to find time to read her and will. But first Tolstoy and Cervantes. Maybe in August. That will give us something to talk about on car drives.
Clare
[…] I have much literary work to do: I have to make the syllabus for my coming Gaskell course for my course at OLLI at Mason which starts next week. I have been deeply gratified over these past […]
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