ABSTRACT
It may be coincidence that Yorshire is the setting of the novel after The Life of Charlotte Bronte, but the suggestion that she might write a life of Sir George Saville, and her enthusiasm for 'the life of a great Yorkshire Squire of the last century' as subject, possibly turned Gaskell's mind to that county and to a past age, while the controversies provoked by contemporary characters and 'problem' subjects may have sent her to something she had tried before settling to Mary Barton - a tale, 'the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire' .1 This description does not fit Syll'ia 's Lovers and clearly she did not turn back to the actual material of that abandoned work. This novel, though, is her first extended historical fiction - Ruth has marked contemporaneity in a 'problem' theme and for all its period detail is set well within the previous fifty years - and it is suggestive that some of the short stories of this period are historical: 'The Poor Clare' (1856), 'Lois the Witch' (1859), and 'The Grey Woman' (1861), while in 1859, about the time she agreed to Smith's terms for a new novel, Gaskell was much involved with the early work of George Eliot and the author's identity. Scenes of Clerical Life ( 1858) - she
particularly admired 'Janet's Repentance' - and Adam Bede ( 1859) take us back in time, and Gaskell, thanking John Blackwood for a copy of the latter, remarked that 'I was brought up in Warwickshire, and recognize the country in every description of natural scenery' (533). History was finding play in her imagination.
