Tag Archives: Mrs. Gaskell

Mrs. Gaskell, Classics, and Me

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Mrs. Gaskell is in the canon now, but that wasn’t always the case.  Years ago, on a visit to my boyfriend’s parents, I was reading her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughter, which I’d bought at a university bookstore.

And then Somebody’s Boyfriend (I can’t remember to whom he belonged) mocked Mrs. Gaskell.

“What are you reading?” 

I looked over my glasses.  “It’s a rediscovered classic by Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer.”

“Gotta be careful of those rediscovered writers.”  He thought it was a scream that anyone would read Mrs. Gaskell.  “It’s a con to sell books.”

I said coolly. “It’s a great book. Want to look at it?”

He did not take up this challenge.  He thought it was too, too funny.

This is the kind of interaction women used to have with men about women’s literature. The professors (mostly male then) were vague about women writers. Occasionally they’d teach Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. It was in Women’s Studies classes that you readSusanna Rowson, Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, and Dorothy Richardson.

I am a great fan of the liberal arts. I graduated with honors in School of Letters (a major long ago eliminated by the university), with an emphasis on classical languages.  I was so attuned to Latin that I won the Latin Prize.  But it’s when you start dreaming in Latin that you realize you’ve been enchanted by Roman magic.

And then I went to graduate school to get my M.A. in classics, a mystic, if rigorous experience.  I was elated by the strange sound and sense of lucid, mysterious Greek tragedy but I relate more to the exquisite Rpman poetry. In graduate school, I taught first-year Latin and Virgil as a T.A., then worked for a year as a Visiting Lecturer.

How can I explain the enchantment of the classics? In T. S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “What Is a Classic?”, he vigorously claims Virgil’s Aeneid is the only classic in the Western canon. He believes the Latin language was at the height of maturity in the first century BCE, and Roman civilization at its apex during Augustus’s reign. 

And so I was devastated to read in a newspaper that the state university is considering cutting majors in six low- enrollment programs: classical languages, Italian, Russian, women’s studies, African-American studies, and applied physics.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. The university has hung on to classics for years, even when some eastern colleges eliminated it.

We don’t believe in signs in the yard, but I may be the first on the block with a SAVE THE LIBERAL ARTS sign.

To celebrate and promote the endangered classics, I am posting a link below to an essay I wrote in 2022 about Ovid’s two poems about abortion (Amores).  These are, to my knowledge, the first poems about abortion. 

https://thornfieldhall.blog/ovid-on-his-mistresss-abortion-2/

Question of the Month: What Was Your Brontë Gateway Drug?

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I am puzzled by the fascination of pop culture tabloids – the racy, muddled archives of cinema and celebrity.   

Our own pop culture archives are less extensive: we delve into old books and reflect on them.  Lately I’ve been reading  the Brontës, and since we Brontë  devotees are less cultish than Jane Austen fans, I’ve been wondering: “What is the Brontë gateway drug? Does everyone start with Jane Eyre?” One dark Brontë book leads to another, and soon you’ve read the complete oeuvre – and then what?  There’s always the secondary literature!

CHARLOTTE IS MY GATEWAY DRUG

My gateway drug, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, is not necessarily the best of the Brontës’ books. That would be Villette, Charlotte’s mature autobiographical masterpiece. 

But almost every reader starts with Jane Eyre,  her brilliant bildungsroman about an orphan’s upbringing, work, and thorny love affair.

Passion and madness dominate Jane Eyre, which can be read as a psychological autobiography. After a rocky childhood and education at a poorly-run charity school (Charlotte attended such a school),  Jane becomes a governess and falls in love with Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall.  He is adorable, in a sarcastic, teasing way, but there are strange doings at night at the hall.  Jane saves Mr. Rochester’s life when a strange woman sets his draperies on fire in the dead of night.   

Say what you might, you cannot marry a man who keeps a mad wife in the attic. (Rochester’s wife set the fire.)  But after Jane leaves, the novel becomes even darker:  St. John Rivers, a fanatical minister, tries to mesmerize her into marrying him and accompanying him to India, where Jane, who is not strong, would die, as his sisters, Diana and Mary, tell them both. I believe that St. John is every bit as mad and destructive as Rochester’s wife.

Some read Jane Eyre as a Gothic novel. Others read it as psychological voodoo.  Here is how the psycho stuff works. If Jane is  Charlotte, then Rochester is her moody, alcoholic brother, Branwell, and Jane’s friends, Diana and Mary Rivers, have to be Emily and Anne.  Does that make sense?  Maybe if you’re on a gateway drug! 

No, I’m joking. It does make sense.

Branwell Brontë’s portrait of his sisters.

THE LORE OF THE Brontës 

I am fascinated by the lore of the Brontës.

The lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë  have been transformed into myth over the years. And I can’t help but think I’ve got some of it wrong myself. Did I really read that, in her governess days, Anne once tied her unruly charges to the legs of a table so she could write? It seems most improbable.

Biographers and critics, too, delve into their archives with varying reliability and appeal. Juliet Barker’s biography, The Brontës, is fascinating and scholarly, and worth dipping into even if you can’t face all 1,000 pages. But my favorite is Mrs. Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, because Gaskell is a spellbinding storyteller. Critics grumble about her inaccuracies and mythologizing, but she had the advantage of a close friendship with Charlotte.

We readers visualize Charlotte, Emily, and Anne as prototypes of their fictional characters, walking on the windy moors, falling in love with brutes (some of their dissipated heroes, like Emily’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, were probably modeled on their alcoholic, drug-taking brother Branwell),  and struggling to survive as poor, genteel women, working as governesses and teachers.

The Brontës, who lived most of their lives at Haworth Parsonage, published seven of the most exciting and controversial novels of the 19th century – under men’s names.  All three wrote explosive narratives about dark love and separation, though their personal experiences of romance were limited. Emily in particular was reclusive and did not thrive outside the home; both Anne and Emily worked briefly as teachers or governesses, but were too sickly to survive in the workplace.  

Charlotte, the most robust sister, drew on her experience in Brussels as well as on her home life and imagination.  Charlotte studied languages in Brussels with Emily in 1842. Then she herself returned in 1843 and  taught there.  She fell in love with M. Heger, the married owner of the school. (Her mature autobiographical novel, Villette, is based partly on these experiences.) 

Charlotte was the only sister who married.  She married her father’s curate, Rev. A. B. Nicholls, in 1854, and died the next year of an illness contracted during her pregnancy.

In their novels, they were ambivalent about marriage, and it does seem that Charlotte’s marriage killed her.

I love all of the Brontës. I am a great fan of Emily, the wildest and most poetic of the three , though I don’t admire Wuthering Heights as much as I used to. And Anne, who is in vogue now, is my least favorite. But however you rate them , they are three of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century.