ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Elizabeth Gaskell's response to his request, as she creates a pivotal role for the fiery Irishman in her biography, and re-creates him again in her final, unfinished novel Wives and Daughters, which features a surgeon of Scottish heritage as the father of her motherless heroine. It explains Gaskell's most pervasive responses to a father's traditional authority. Gaskell's presentation is ideologically charged, and inflected by her approach to novel-writing. The libel accusations Gaskell faced after the first edition of the biography left her stunned and chastised. The fragmentation of Gaskell's father figures is intimately connected with the most common subject within her works the relationship between a daughter's life narrative and a father's intervention in it. Elizabeth Gaskell approaches Patrick Bront, and the task of writing his daughter's story, having honed her skills in writing Janus-faced, murderous fathers.
