Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online

and became pregnant. Her outraged father locked her up in her room while ‘her elder sisters flouted at and scorned her’ (pp. 44, 45). Haworth legend reveals that the ghosts of the mother and her daughter continue to haunt the area.
    28 It is worth noting in this context Uglow’s point that ‘Lois the Witch’ invites the reader to criticize and reject the ‘masculine’ misreadings of the Old Testament by showing us the cruelties and prejudices inherent in the blind distortion of Scriptural readings
(Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
, p. 479).
    29 The families themselves can be seen as doubled constructs in this story; Owen’s domestic arrangement with Nest is the affectionate, mother-centred home which is the mirror opposite of the malicious, manipulative family created by Owen’s cruel stepmother, confusingly called ‘Mrs Owen’.
    30
The Letters of Charles Dickens
, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vol. 8, p. 4.
    31 Gaskell herself was raised by a ‘surrogate’ mother, her aunt Hannah Lumb, and surrounded by a community of women not too unlike those described in
Cranford
(1853). See Uglow,
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
, p. 31, and Elizabeth Gaskell,
Cranford
, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
    FURTHER READING
    Although very little has been written on the stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, there are some excellent more general studies of her life and works, the best of which is Jenny Uglow's exemplary biography,
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
(London: Faber and Faber, 1993). Uglow examines all of the pieces in this collection in some degree, and provides a portrait of the writer in lively, well-researched detail. Patsy Stoneman's
Elizabeth Gaskell
(Sussex: Harvester, 1987) also discusses the stories, and Enid L. Duthie's
The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell
(London: Macmillan, 1980) devotes a chapter to themes of ‘Mystery and Macabre’. Angus Easson's
Elizabeth Gaskell
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) provides biographical information as well as discussions of each story, and there is a chapter on the short fiction in Arthur Pollard,
Mrs Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Although unfortunately out of print, the Knutsford edition,
The Works of Mrs. Gaskell
, ed. A. W. Ward, 8 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1906), provides relevant and useful historical information. Even more invaluable to the modern critic is John Geoffrey Sharps,
Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works
(Sussex: Linden Press, 1970), which is exhaustively researched and includes relatively obscure background detail on all of Gaskell's works of fiction, short and long. Finally, no Gaskellian library is complete without
The Letters of Mrs Gaskell
, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997), which provides the clearest insight of all into the writer as written by herself.
    Apart from these full-length works, there are several articles writtenabout some of the stories in this collection. For the publishing background to ‘The Old Nurse's Story’, it is worth consulting Annette B. Hopkins, ‘Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell’,
Huntingdon Library Quarterly
, 9: 4 (1945–6), pp. 357–85. Also of interest is Carol A. Martin, ‘Gaskell's Ghosts: Truths in disguise’,
Studies in the Novel
, 21: 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 27–40. Janice K. Kirkland, ‘“Curious, If True”: Suggesting more’, and Peter Stiles, ‘Calvin's encounter with Cinderella: Vital antinomies in Elizabeth Gaskell's ”Curious, If True (1860)”’, in
Gaskell Society Journal
, 12 (1998), pp. 21–7 and 14–20, are particularly interesting. J. R. Watson, ‘“Round the Sofa”: Elizabeth Gaskell tells stories’,
Yearbook of English Studies
, 26