8 - Elizabeth Gaskell’s shorter pieces

Summary

Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction is beginning to receive the attention it deserves; her novels are widely available in paperback editions, several have been adapted for radio and television, and recent critical studies have helped to establish her as one of the important novelists of the Victorian period. But, curiously, her shorter pieces have been largely disregarded by publishers and critics alike, perhaps because until now many have been difficult for modern readers to access, though both T. A. Ward and Clement Shorter included most of them in their respective Knutsford (1906) and World's Classics (1906-19) editions. Gaskell's shorter works make up a considerable portion of her oeuvre: alongside her seven full-length novels and four novellas, she published more than forty short pieces, including stories, essays, autobiographical reminiscences, and travelogues. Wide-ranging in content and technique, these show Gaskell at her most original and inventive, experimenting with genre and narrative methodology, and dealing with topics which, though also explored in her novels, often have a sharper impact in the more restricted space. One reason for the relative obscurity of these pieces may be their resistance to easy grouping or classification. Their variety makes it difficult to place them in obvious generic categories - usually a publishing desideratum - and their transgressive characteristics represent a kind of literary hybridization which prevents easy definition. Yet it is this variety and originality which makes them so fascinating and so deserving of critical consideration.