Elizabeth Gaskell’s Smaller Stories

Download or read book Elizabeth Gaskell’s Smaller Stories written by Carolyn Lambert and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-locates Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘smaller stories’ in the literary and cultural context of the nineteenth century. While Gaskell is recognised as one of the major novelists of her time, the short stories that make up a large proportion of her published work have not yet received the critical attention they deserve. This study re-claims them as an indispensable part of her literary output that enables us to better contextualize and assess her achievement holistically as a highly-skilled woman of letters. The periodicals in which Gaskell’s shorter pieces were published offer a microcosm of nineteenth-century society, and Gaskell took full advantage of the medium to apply a consistent and barbed challenge to cultural and gendered constructs of roles and social behaviour. Although her eminently readable prose still flows easily in her short stories, it is less likely to elide the sharp corners of domestic violence, the disabling experiences of women, the pain of death and loss, and the complications of family life.