Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, edited by Laura Kranzler

Penguin, 2001

ISBN-13: 978-0140437416

Available: New and used paperback, Kindle edition

In the spirit of Women in Horror Month, I try every year to read something by a woman writer of Gothic fiction, horror or supernatural fiction that may not be well known today. Sometimes these writers are not known of to any but the most enthusiastic researchers and readers, and sometimes they are known, but not for their Gothic or supernatural fiction (Edith Wharton, for example). Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell may be a little of both. Like many women writers in the Romantic or Victorian era, Gaskell’s work was dismissed as old-fashioned or sentimental by literary critics for much of the 20th century. She was a contemporary of Charles Dickens, and her work was frequently published by him, but while Dickens was assigned reading when I was in high school, I had never even heard of Gaskell until I started looking into women writers of the 19th and early 20th century during Women in Horror Month several years ago. And Gaskell, even now that she is better-known (and she is much better known now) is mainly known for her novels of social realism, not her ghost stories and Gothic tales. It’s not that difficult to go to Amazon and find most of her novels, but my library didn’t have a collection of her short stories. When I searched Amazon for a collection of her work several months back, I found just one book that I knew for sure would have her Gothic tales in it, Gothic Tales (of course. I can now find several collections of her stories available, many of which came out last year, so go figure).

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was just thirteen years younger than Mary Shelley. Her parents, William and Elizabeth Stevenson, were not famous or controversial. While, like Shelley, Elizabeth’s mother died when she was too young to remember her, and she spent much of her childhood away from her father, acquiring a stepmother when she was four, the rest of her life was much more conventional. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, the assistant pastor of the Unitarian church in Manchester, England, and took on the duties of a minister’s wife: teaching Sunday school, visiting the poor, and other charitable activities. She gave birth to four children, three girls (Marianne, Margaret Emily, and Florence) and a boy, William, who died after a bout of scarlet fever. Gaskell had already had a few short stories published, and her husband suggested she work on a novel as a way of dealing with her grief over William’s death.

Manchester was a busy, industrial town, with many living in poverty while others acquired considerable fortunes. It had a growing artistic community, as well as many people interested in social justice and radical politics. Gaskell, as a minister’s wife and writer, had the opportunity to observe people of all kinds and social classes and their problems, and she used her observations in her writing. Like her contemporary, Charles Dickens (who actually published some of her work), she used entertaining and suspenseful plots to draw attention and sympathy to the plight of the impoverished. She was also friends with Charlotte Bronte, and wrote a biography of her.

In 1846, a fourth daughter, Julia was born, and several years later she and her family moved to a larger house, where she hosted many important visitors, while still carrying on with charitable works and continuing to write stories and novels. She traveled, often with her children, and enjoyed an active social life until she died in 1865. I know, not the life of a tortured, romantic soul. Her short fiction is where Gothic horror touches her work.

Reading Gaskell’s short stories  is like watching a meandering train journey that you know is going to end in a wreck of some kind. Her stories take the time to build character and setting through minor incidents that create uneasy circumstances, creating a slow burn as the tension increases, until suddenly a terrifying main event occurs (a murder, home invasion, or accusation, for example). In The Crooked Branch, it’s easy to see  this process in action: how Nathan and Hester, uneducated farmers indulging and justifying early selfish acts in their son Benjamin out of love leads to his developing into a selfish, uncaring adult who manipulates them and his cousin Bessy (and a title like The Crooked Branch is solid foreshadowing that there isn’t some kind of redemption at the end). But we see these indulgences and excuses one at a time, as they pile up: as his character worsens, they become even more difficult to explain, even after explosive and violent events. In the end, it is not only the damage done to them physically and mentally that is the most difficult for all three to suffer, but their admission of their complicity in making him what he has become.

Lois the Witch is harder to bear, because Lois, a young English Catholic whose parents have died, is a victim all the way through the story, which is a fictionalized reimagining of the Salem Witch Trials. Sent to America to live with her Puritan aunt and uncle, she is never treated as welcome despite all her efforts to be helpful, caring, and virtuous. A long, slowly developing series of events lead us toward what we know will be the accusation of witchcraft aimed at her by her cousins and aunt. Particularly disturbing elements of this story include the fixation of her mentally ill cousin Manasseh on marrying her. and the gaslighting that nearly convinces Lois that she must be a witch since everyone around her claims she is.  In The Gray Woman, the main character, rejected by her stepmother, is forced into an unwanted marriage with a wealthy man who lives in an isolated location, and keeps her locked up to prevent her discovering his dark secrets. While none of these stories touch on the supernatural, they certainly show the flaws in a system that protects privileged men such as Benjamin and Manasseh at the expense of vulnerable girls who see no other options.

Gaskell also writes about the consequences of evil passed down through generations. In The Doom of the Griffiths, a curse passed through generations of family results in tragedy. This particular story feels especially tragic because Gaskell draws a sympathetic portrait of the last two generations and you truly feel that the curse will be broken. The Poor Clare demonstrates how twisted a curse can be, when Bridget, a former servant whose daughter has been lost to her,  has a curse she set on the owner of the estate after he killed her dog, turns back on her own family.  In both these stories, unfortunately, cruel and thoughtless actions of upper-class men have tragic results for young women. Evan as a respectable minister’s wife, Gaskell didn’t pull her punches when it came to the effects of cruelty on the vulnerable.

Houses as traps appear frequently in Gaskell’s stories. The Old Nurse’s Story is a terrifying ghost story that takes place in a falling-apart, disturbingly haunted mansion which the narrator, nurse to a young girl whose guardian has declared it her home, feels she cannot leave because of her concern for her charge. The main character in The Gray Woman, first trapped in her husband’s home, then in every other place she seeks refuge, ends up, even once she is safe, unable to leave her house.

Many of Gaskell’s stories are metafictional: The Poor Clare is told by a young man who finds himself involved in Bridget’s family’s affairs;  Disappearances reports stories the narrator supposedly found in the news; the majority of The Gray Woman  is told in a letter by the main character to her daughter, read by a visitor to a mill; and Curious, if True is indicated to be part of a letter even in the title. It’s an interesting trick that both pulls the reader in, because it creates the impression that we are hearing the story told directly to us, while also keeping us at a remove, because it draws attention to the fact that this is a story told by a storyteller,  about something that happened in the past, “long ago and far away”.

In addition to her gift at creating atmosphere and suspense, Gaskell has a fine imagination. Curious, if True stands out in the collection as a clever and fantastical story that integrates a contemporary character into a fairytale world, but is quite different from the others.

Gothic Tales has a useful, if lengthy, introduction, with notes and suggested reading, and additional notes in the back for reference in the individual stories, which is helpful when Gaskell makes contemporary references. I can’t say if it is the best or most complete collection of her Gothic and supernatural fiction, but it does contain some of her most well-known stories (The Poor Clare, The Nurse’s Story, The Gray Woman, Lois the Witch, The Crooked Branch). While there are other collections available now, I think this one was a good place to start.

Despite Gaskell being a talented Victorian writer, her work fell out of fashion for much of the 20th century, but it is now being recognized once again. While mostly known for her novels of social realism such as Mary Barton, Ruth, Sylvia’s Daughters, Cranford, North and South, and the unfinished Wives and Daughters, Gaskell’s Gothic and fantastical stories are worth tracking down. I must admit that this is my first experience reading the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I don’t think it will be the last. Whether you choose to take a look at this one or a different collection, I highly recommend you try her out.

Want to know more about Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell? 

Visit the Gaskell Society’s website.

Check out this New Yorker article about her,  “The Unjustly Overlooked Victorian Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell”.