1. Elizabeth Gaskell (2008), Tales of Mystery and the Macabre (ed. David Stuart Davies)
I began reading this in early December, hoping that it would provide some seasonally-appropriate chills in the run-up to Christmas (as Dickens did for me last year), and finished it last night. My leisure reading is always glacially slow, but that's still at the slower end of the spectrum, and does reflect me struggling to really take to Gaskell's style. I can't even really put a convincing finger on why, either. One basic factor is that the stories aren't all that ghostly, so they didn't tick the box I was looking for. The title of the collection is accurate in placing 'Mystery' first - there are rather more highwaymen, robbers and false identities than ghosts. But while I like a good ghost, I'm not rabidly against the other types of stories presented here. Nor do I have any particular problem with their shared central themes of family feuds, lost and uncertain orphans and hard circumstances. And I entirely see that they are well crafted, with lots of attention to character, local dialect and historical detail. The only reasons I can really put forward for not being wowed by this collection are that sometimes the misery just gets too grinding and inescapable, and that at those points the only hopes and comforts alluded to revolve around Christian religious piety. (One story literally ends with a miserable, wronged person dying, followed by the final sentence "But the broken-hearted go Home, to be comforted of God", which is more or less exactly calculated to me want to barf.) However I do know that both the misery and the piety were just reality for many of the sorts of characters Gaskell writes about, and many of the people around her. Anyway, although there are nine stories in the book, no-one wants to read in any further detail than I've already outlined why I wasn't that into seven of them. So instead I will focus on recording why two of them were really great.
The Old Nurse's Story. This was the first story in the collection, and involved the old nurse of the title relating her teenage experience of being sent, with a little girl as her charge, to a huge house occupied by only a few servants and reclusive elderly people. As winter sets in, she begins to notice strange phenomena - the sound of the organ in the great hall playing, even though no-one is sitting at its keyboard and its pipe are lying in dusty disarray on the ground, and a little girl outside in the snow banging on the window to be let in but making nary a sound. We have there a nice pairing - sound without a source and a source without a sound - demonstrating in each case that something supernatural is going in. The nurse's little charge is, of course, particularly sensitive and susceptible to the ghostly girl knocking on the window, but she does just about manage to stop her from running out to die in the snow with her, while also learning of the old family injustice which lies behind the strange events and is being lived out over and over again until the wronged parties are avenged. Very spooky and effective, and just the sort of story I was looking for.
The Grey Woman. Much later in the collection, this too mainly consists of an ageing woman looking back on and narrating a story of her youth. This time, she is a German miller's daughter who is courted by and marries a rather effete French aristocrat, only to find when she goes to live in his château that he cuts off all contact with her family, keeps her shut up in a suite of rooms, and eventually turns out to be part of a band of robbers who murder a local landowner and bring his body back to the château to dispose of it. At this point, she and her pragmatic maid / companion Amante decide to escape from the château, and most of the rest of the story features them on the run while her former husband tries to hunt them down. So it's already basically a story of a woman escaping from a disastrous coercive relationship with the help of another woman, and has a lot of power and emotional heft to it just for that. But then, while they are on the run, Amante chops all her hair off and adopts men's clothing so that they can pass as a married couple to evade the murderous husband's pursuit and earn some money by working as itinerant tailors. In other words, it basically became a lesbian love story - an impression not at all dampened by the way they share beds and lodgings as they journey onwards, sentences like "I cannot tell you how much in these doubtings and wanderings I became attached to Amante", or the fact that the narrator is already pregnant when they escape they chateau, so that their little family is soon completed by the arrival of a baby. I really doubt Gaskell meant anything of the sort, and indeed the queer honeymoon does not go on forever - the husband's gang eventually catch and murder Amante, while the narrator goes on to marry a sensible local doctor who helped deliver the baby. But it was nice while it lasted.
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The Old Nurse's Story. This was the first story in the collection, and involved the old nurse of the title relating her teenage experience of being sent, with a little girl as her charge, to a huge house occupied by only a few servants and reclusive elderly people. As winter sets in, she begins to notice strange phenomena - the sound of the organ in the great hall playing, even though no-one is sitting at its keyboard and its pipe are lying in dusty disarray on the ground, and a little girl outside in the snow banging on the window to be let in but making nary a sound. We have there a nice pairing - sound without a source and a source without a sound - demonstrating in each case that something supernatural is going in. The nurse's little charge is, of course, particularly sensitive and susceptible to the ghostly girl knocking on the window, but she does just about manage to stop her from running out to die in the snow with her, while also learning of the old family injustice which lies behind the strange events and is being lived out over and over again until the wronged parties are avenged. Very spooky and effective, and just the sort of story I was looking for.
The Grey Woman. Much later in the collection, this too mainly consists of an ageing woman looking back on and narrating a story of her youth. This time, she is a German miller's daughter who is courted by and marries a rather effete French aristocrat, only to find when she goes to live in his château that he cuts off all contact with her family, keeps her shut up in a suite of rooms, and eventually turns out to be part of a band of robbers who murder a local landowner and bring his body back to the château to dispose of it. At this point, she and her pragmatic maid / companion Amante decide to escape from the château, and most of the rest of the story features them on the run while her former husband tries to hunt them down. So it's already basically a story of a woman escaping from a disastrous coercive relationship with the help of another woman, and has a lot of power and emotional heft to it just for that. But then, while they are on the run, Amante chops all her hair off and adopts men's clothing so that they can pass as a married couple to evade the murderous husband's pursuit and earn some money by working as itinerant tailors. In other words, it basically became a lesbian love story - an impression not at all dampened by the way they share beds and lodgings as they journey onwards, sentences like "I cannot tell you how much in these doubtings and wanderings I became attached to Amante", or the fact that the narrator is already pregnant when they escape they chateau, so that their little family is soon completed by the arrival of a baby. I really doubt Gaskell meant anything of the sort, and indeed the queer honeymoon does not go on forever - the husband's gang eventually catch and murder Amante, while the narrator goes on to marry a sensible local doctor who helped deliver the baby. But it was nice while it lasted.
Dreamwidth version |
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