ABSTRACT

Readings of Elizabeth Gaskell tend to emphasise her novels’ social aims. Social concerns were certainly high on Gaskell’s agenda, but they are a part of a conflicted program. In Wives and Daughters unfinished novel, Gaskell manufactures a place for herself in literary history with recourse to the biographical and literary commonplaces about the Romantic poet. Gaskell relishes poking fun at the claims of her more conventionally ‘poetic’ characters; she is more literate by far than any of them. Many of Gaskell’s readers have noticed her ambivalence about social and sexual change: this ambivalence has created a dilemma for those who might have wished she were more socially revolutionary. Far from constructing a female line of Romanticism, Gaskell questions the gender stance of both the Romantic and post-Romantic poet. Gaskell connects Mr. Osborne’s condition to his writing. Osborne’s model is intentionally unclear because Gaskell is making greater use of the ‘imitative’ nature of Osborne’s poetry.