I had the eerie feeling the other day that I was being cyberstalked.

“It isn’t possible,” I told myself sensibly. 

I am not very active online, so it would be a very dull stalking. Oh, yeah, there she is again, reading book reviews. Oh, and then she watches a book vlog. And then she reads the best books of the month lists, month after month.

But here’s the unlikely thing: if I attend an online book group discussion of John Barth and other ’60s writers, the stalker is there. Ditto for the year-long reading of Romola. He/she also attends the Erica Jong readalong. And, of course, he/she couldn’t miss the creative writing sessions, though I have fallen hopelessly behind…

Well, I admit, this is probably a coincidence. Whither I go… he/she goeth, too? (Surely not.)

This is a mild form of stalking, if that’s what it is – more like a reading crush? Though, really, at my age I do not inspire crushes. Still, one tries to look on the bright side. The whole thing is probably a coincidence.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage (1850) is an appealing short novel. It’s part bildungsroman, part romance, and part adventure.

Maggie, Edward, and their mother Mrs. Browne, a curate’s widow, live in the lovely, isolated Moorland Cottage.  They have no contact with the outside world except on Sundays when they go to church. 

This book is the predecessor of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which was published 10 years later. Gaskell’s Maggie, like George Eliot’s Maggie, is more intelligent than her brother. Gaskell’s Edward, however, is good at Latin and a promising student, unlike Eliot’s Tom, who muddles.

Still, Maggie has to solve the engineering problems. When Edward makes a toy ship that “toppled every time I sent her [in the pond]” Maggie gives advice.

“Has it? – that’s very tiresome.  Would it do to put a little weight in it, to keep it down?”

Gaskell’s writing is lyrical. In fact, some of her best nature writing is in the first half of this book. In the second half, when the Brownes become close to the wealthy Buxton family, the plot takes over, and things seem a bit out of balance.

But I love Gaskell, and enjoyed this novel very much. It is for Gaskell fans and fans of minor Victorian novels.