Introduction: The Politics of Provincial Fiction

Summary

Although Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot were near contemporaries, spanning two generations, and were celebrated for their representations of rural life, the three authors have never been extensively studied together. Readers often considered that the authors’ glimpses of rural life were based on their individual experiences, and their works were marketed accordingly. Yet when Elizabeth Gaskell undertook in 1851 to write the literary sketches for Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens that would later appear as Cranford (1853), she looked to Mitford. In Our Village (1824–32) Mitford established the prototype of a new genre to which many writers throughout the century attributed aspects of their craft. In turn, when Mary Ann (or, alternatively, Marian) Evans – who had been a journalist, translator and editor – tried her hand at fiction, the future George Eliot drew inspiration from Cranford and from the thematic and formal techniques of both Gaskell and Mitford.

Tracing this chain of influence, The Provincial Fiction of Mitford, Gaskell and Eliot shows how, for all three writers, a sense place drives cultural, social and political thought. It also demonstrates that Mitford, Gaskell and Eliot, whose representations of place have often been employed in service to projects of restorative nostalgia that seek to reconstruct the present in the image of the past, worked within a reflective strain that accepted the pastness of the past and embraced, however reluctantly and wistfully, change. I consider the challenges the three authors encountered in achieving distinction as writers of provincial fiction within the literary sphere, including the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers and editors. I also analyse the possibilities afforded by different modes of publication – including periodicals, anthologies, the one-volume novel, the three-volume novel, and monthly and bimonthly instalments – as well as their concomitant limitations. In so doing, the book offers a reassessment of Mitford's and Gaskell's provincial fiction, which has been frequently derided as a ‘minor literature’. It also demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of Eliot's liberalism in the age of high realism.