ABSTRACT
In May 1850, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to Lady Kaye-Shuttleworth, 'I am always glad and thankful to Him that I am a wife and mother and that I am so happy in the performance of those clear and defined duties' .1 This declaration takes us straight to the most obvious difference between Gaskell and the other women novelists examined in this study: she actually participated in the 'norm' of female experience about which they could write only at second-hand; her conviction that marriage and motherhood represent the apotheoses of womanly fulfilment thus carries the weight of personal validation. Gaskell seems largely to have escaped the emotional crises and rolequestioning which affected many of her female contemporaries. Basically stable and optimistic by nature, she married early, and her union with William Gaskell, despite later laboured interpretations to prove the contrary,2 was on the whole successful. If, as seems a reasonable assumption, Gaskell's fictional portrayals of unhappy marriages indicate her recognition that matrimony as an institution has its limitations, this is not to say that she was dissatisfied with her own state. Her rueful remarks about William's reserve and his unwillingness to be bothered with domestic tribulations or family arrangements-even her well-known account of how he 'composedly buttoned . . . up in his pocket the proceeds of Lizzie Leigh3 - hardly negate the very powerful sense of contentment which emanates generally from her letters. Her warm concern for her children, also described so delightfully in her correspondence, reinforces this image of her and gives small grounds for theories of her unwilled or resented 'relativity'.
