Of Swords and Parasols

And so my quest to read all the Gaskell works that were used for Cranford is complete! Except that I think Cranford 2 incorporates another of Gaskell’s shorter novels.

Set around 1800, My Lady Ludlow focuses on changing social mores, filtered through the eyes of Margaret Dawson, the poor distant relation of Lady Ludlow, an older woman whose family has ruled over the town of Hanbury, unchanging, for generations. Lady Ludlow is exceptionally kind, but also extremely opposed to change, especially when it comes to gender and class roles.

The miniseries (which is set several decades after the book) only takes versions of the characters (only Lady Ludlow herself and Harry, the young son of a poacher who enters her circle against her will, remain unchanged) and certain events from the book, and so the overall effect is very different, despite the fact that, like Cranford-the-book and Cranford-the-miniseries, the central focus is on women in a changing society who may not yet be ready for the change.

My favorite part of the book is the backstory of Clement and Virginie de Crequy, two young French aristocrats caught up in the French Revolution, which explains why Lady Ludlow is so opposed to educating the lower classes. I may or may not have wished there was a book about Virginie.

Gaskell’s prose definitely works way better in longer fiction for me, though I now know that there’s another collection of her short works in print and want it, though I have no idea what’s in it.

I actually read Cranford earlier this year, but got this off Amazon recently. A little under 2/5 of it is Cranford and the rest is six novelas and short stories. Namely Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, The Doom of the Griffiths, Lois the Witch, Curious, If True, Six Weeks at Heppenheim, and Cousin Phillis.

Mr. Harrison’s Confessions is about a young doctor who moves to a town populated mostly by women and finds himself engaged to several women without realizing it, and none are the woman he actually wants to be engaged to. It’s one of the stories that was folded into the Cranford miniseries and is pretty much a lesser Cranford. Not that a lesser Cranford is a bad thing by any means. Lois the Witch is a rather straightforward accounting of a young woman accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials, and does a concerningly good job of showing how jealousy and paranoia ruined lives. Cousin Phillis is about two cousins who, in any other story, would have fallen in love, but instead are platonic, and it’s surprisingly effective at examining a woman’s place in society through a man’s eyes. Curious, If True is rather fun as an earlier take on skewed fairy tales, but I confess to not remembering much about The Doom of the Griffiths and Six Weeks at Heppenheim, save that The Doom of the Griffiths was dark in a way that doesn’t appeal to me.

In complete honesty, I like Gaskell’s plots and themes, but find her actual writing to be somewhat on the dull side, and rather slow. That said, I seem to recall thinking that of most of the Victorian era writings that I read in high school and college, so that may be more a product of the style for when she was writing than Gaskell herself. I also find it to be consistently less of a problem the longer the work is, so format is probably also a factor.