Jill L. Matus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell.

Cambridge University Press

2007. xxi, 212. $30.95 U.S.

Not long ago, the superb British magazine The Reader featured an essay by Josie Billington on
the question Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today? Billington closes with a lament that Gaskell
remains so subject to the modern habit of categorisation (ghettoised as a social-problem
novelist or considered of interest only to womens studies).1 The excellent Cambridge
Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell should give Billington cause for celebration: it testifies to the
range of current academic approaches to Gaskells work, and Susan Hamiltons concluding
chapter also highlights the surge in popular interest, both demonstrated and fed by the activities
of the Gaskell Society and recent BBC adaptations of her fiction. Clearly many people are, in
fact, reading Gaskell today, and for many reasons.

Gaskells low critical standing early in the last century stems, as Hamilton and other contributors
emphasize, from the legacy of nineteenth-century critics who (to use a dichotomy Gaskell herself
made famous in her biography of Charlotte Bront) could not see the writer for the woman.
Beloved then as now for her warm humanity and genial affections (6), Gaskell has only
recently been acknowledged as an author of works richly ambivalent, transgressive, and
formally sophisticated (2). The influence of Marxist and feminist criticism and, more recently,
the rise of cultural studies moved Gaskell criticism beyond the narrowly formalist practice that
had perpetuated her marginalization.

Josie Billington, Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today? The Reader No. 17 (Spring 2005), 21-26.

All of the essays in the Cambridge Companion in their own ways reflect the emphasis on social,
cultural, and political contexts predicted by this critical genealogy. In a short space it is not
possible to give detailed attention to them all. Jill Matuss introduction helpfully sets up many of
the biographical, critical, and thematic cruxes on which the rest of the volume will turn, and
Dierdre DAlbertis gives an illuminating account of Gaskells life and letters. Five chapters are
then organized around Gaskells major works; one focuses on her short stories and non-fiction;
three further essays are thematically organized. Hamiltons metacritical reflections provide a
fitting conclusion. The quality of both analysis and writing is uniformly high. At the same time,
the collection highlights the challenge of addressing both students and scholars. The formeror
just inquiring general readerswill find much of help and interest here, from the thorough
chronology to John Chapples detailed account of Unitarian dissent. They may be less well
served by Jill Matuss decision, in her chapter on Mary Barton and North and South, to turn from
the obvious topic of their representation of industrial life, and their purchase on the relations of
works and masters, labor and capital to emotional and psychic states (27). Yet Matuss novel
approach enriches the volumes value for the specialist. Conversely, Marion Shaws chapter on
Sylvias Lovers nicely articulates the historiographical elements of Gaskells fiction, but the
importance of typical characters in the historical novel after Scott (77) or the insight that
history lies around us in the litter of everyday life (79) is well-travelled territory for scholars in
this area, and even Shaws notes would not point them in any new critical directions. Such
tension between the introductory and the expert seems a predictable result in a series of this kind.

A different kind of tension exists between the authors resistance to the gendered terms of
appraisal that cast Gaskell as charming, feminine, and domesticand thus not deserving of

critical attentionand their implicit agreement that these qualities are not hallmarks of literary
significance. This volume, were told, presents a more diverse and complex Gaskell than was
previously acknowledged (9). Gaskells idylls, Linda Hughes points out, have been
increasingly repositioned as highly complex, multivalent narratives (91); Shirley Foster calls
attention to the generic transgressiveness of much of Gaskells work (127); Patsy Stoneman
argues that while Gaskell is not an obvious feminist, we can find in her novels a thorough
critique of specific forms of masculine autonomy (145). This revisionist view of Gaskell is
convincing, but does it really reverse those gendered terms of appraisal to insist that she is
radical and subversive more than genial and feminine, political as much as domestic? Would a
woman writer who could not be made so compatible with contemporary critical agendas deserve
her own Cambridge Companion? (Rohan Maitzen)

Institutional affiliation:
Rohan Maitzen
Associate Professor
Department of English
Dalhousie University