Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: Social Classes, Labour and Romance

Once one has read all of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, the natural next step is generally to read Elizabeth Gaskell. She wrote more than one novel. She also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë — whom she knew personally. It was the first Brontë biography, and is still read today although critics now consider it to have taken great liberties with the truth. Although Cranford — a gently-paced look at middle-class village life in the 19th century — has also been filmed for TV with Dame Judi Dench and other venerable actors, North and South is perhaps her most enduringly popular novel.

Gaskell was the daughter of a preacher/tutor/gentleman farmer/keeper of records. She ended up marrying a Unitarian minister and moving from rural Cheshire — the land of Cranford — to the industrial city of Manchester. There she mixed socially with members of parliaments, bankers, and literary figures; while she and her husband also undertook many charitable projects. She published novels in serialized form, and short stories, in a magazine that Charles Dickens ran (1850-59): Household Words. The two of them had conflicts of opinion, but for example I am glad that Dickens suggested North and South as the title instead of Gaskell's suggestion: Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Gaskell, ca. 1860
via Wikimedia Commons

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North and South begins as the heroine, Margaret Hale, returns to the countryside parsonage where her father and mother are living. As a young girl she had been sent to live with London cousins, and now at the age of around 18 she has not seen her only brother Frederick for years, and has not had the closeness to her parents that she would otherwise have had.

Her father, the minister, begins to have doubts about the Anglican Church. Out of principle, he refuses to rise in the ranks of the Church, even though his family would be richer and his wife could climb back toward the aristocratic lifestyle into which she was born. He goes even further and gives up his work in Helstone (where the parsonage lies), stepping out of the Church entirely soon after his daughter returns to the household.

Howard's Lane in Holybourne,
where Elizabeth Gaskell bought a house just before she died

Photograph by Hugh Chevalier
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

AS HIS PLACE of self-exile from everyone who knew him before, Mr. Hale chooses Milton, a northern industrial town that is based on real-life 1850s Manchester. By moving so far away, he wants to escape the blame and ignominy that he would face as someone who has 'foolishly' imperiled his financial standing and respectability by offending a major social institution. The wife, despite her long running complaints about Helstone, is aghast; and so is Margaret.

Milton is a grim home. No greenery grows except at the fringes of the expanding city, the streets are bustling, industrial pollution spreads grime through the air and onto the scene, and factory machinery that does the business of the cotton industry renders it, at times, tremendously noisy.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading Next, Part 2

Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, FL
Photograph c. 1940, in the State Library and Archives of Florida
via Wikimedia Commons

UNWISELY I am working at reading farther into the Teilchen-detektoren book about physics, the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου by Alki Zei, Cavafy's poems and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, at once. Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the impulse hit to begin reading even more books.

Therefore I'm rereading Anne of the Island, which is one of the sequels to the early 20th-century Canadian children's book Anne of Green Gables. And, more ambitiously, reading the 17th-century French drama Bajazet by Jean Racine for the first time. I don't even know what that play is about, because I'm still reading biographical introductory material and don't want to 'peek ahead.' Of course that makes it more fun: exploring old literature as if it were new and just hatched from the egg is exciting and (hopefully) rewarding.

The Three Escapes of
Hannah Arendt
by Ken Krimstein
Bloomsbury, via
Amazon.com

Lastly, godfather M. gave me a graphic novel about Hannah Arendt: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein. After Marjane Satrapi's memoir of life during the political revolutions in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, Persepolis, it's the second graphic novel I've ever read. It was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. And I'm glad to have a starting point to approach the philosopher. My mother has read her work and it sounded like not to read it is to miss timely and relevant perspectives.

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Also, I am re-reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Its existence is, of course, not a great secret amongst fans of classics and literary romance.

North and South, ©BBC (2004)

The BBC adaptation of 2004 has lent it a broader, happy and active readership. Also, on YouTube one can probably still find an older adaptation where Patrick Stewart, predating his Star Trek captainship, strides through the scenes as the tradesman hero.

Amongst the author's other works, Wives and Daughters was depressing and 'domestically claustrophobic' as far as I recall, as well as unfinished. I don't feel like rereading Ruth or Cranford, and I never read Mary Barton or the life of Charlotte Brontë. In short, North and South is my favourite Gaskell work.

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Note Regarding Process: Last year these 'monthly round-up' blog posts appeared with the heading "What We'll Be Reading Next." But this month, new publications are not likely to be discussed and it would be silly to imply that other people must read the same older publications that I am, so I've chosen to use the first person singular instead.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading

Although I've seen that there are of course interesting new releases, I am going to read 'old' books this January.

One of these new releases is, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, by Mildred D. Taylor, whose book The Well (about children in the face of racial prejudice) I found excellent.

As the Guardian's books preview of 2020 noted, Anne Brontë's 200th birthday was on January 17th. I'm ambivalent about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so if anything I'd reread Agnes Grey. Featuring a heroine who leaves home to teach due to her family's financial position, it helps sap all of the illusions that one had about governess work after reading Jane Eyre.

Charlotte did try to adjust expectations in Shirley, but Charlotte's melodramatic vein weakens the effect of her warnings; you don't — or at least I don't — expect to find 'tiger-like' James Helstones pouncing on governesses regularly. To leap to another book, Mrs. Norris, the aunt of the heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is so villainous in an unspectacular, quotidian, realistic way that she makes you shudder; I'd say that the families with which Anne's character, Agnes, stays, impress you in that way as well.

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At the beginning of the year I started with an anthology of news analysis and opinion columns from the Manchester Guardian that was published at the end of 2017: The Bedside Guardian 2017.

It was about Brexit, too, of course; the anthology was compiled the year after the hapless referendum. (The opinion columnists' wide-eyed enthusiasm about the Labour Party's chances of fixing things under Jeremy Corbyn was painful to read, although natural because of how badly the 2017 election went for Theresa May, considering what's happened with the most recent election.)

A few writers argue that Britain's socioeconomic fabric is deteriorating rapidly, apart from thriving hotspots like parts of London.

I guess that right-wing newspapers publish viewpoints that the European Union is to blame for this. But the Guardian's analysts tend to argue that British austerity measures, the 'bedroom tax' which has made living in council housing in Britain an even greater burden, financial exploitation by under-regulated industries (e.g. payday loans), and council taxes that are too low to pay for adequate community services, play a greater role.

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A deeper look at Britain's economic woes is Mike Carter's book All Together Now?, which the Guardian's books arm also published in 2017. (I received it free of charge as a reward for being a member; and read it in December.)

In 2016 Carter travelled on foot between Liverpool and London, 'reliving' a labour rights march that his father took in the early 1980s. He explains his fraught relationship with his father, meets strangers and pre-arranged interviewees as he goes, records the battered socioeconomic order in the towns and cities through which he walks, and analyzes the causes.

December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

Aside from James Baldwin's Another Country, I began reading Edward Snowden's book Permanent Record, a present from my godfather, and published earlier this year.

It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.

It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.

As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.

Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.

I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.

In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.

As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.

Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.

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Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.

I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.

But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.

And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.

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Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.

December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year

The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In November I read Another Country by James Baldwin, a fictional book about a group of friends in New York City (and in France) who are making or breaking careers for themselves in creative fields: writing, acting, and music. The friends also navigate the boundaries between the black and white communities in New York, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, American conservatism and liberalism.

In general Baldwin's writing seems contemporary: He feels pretty unjudgmental. His curiosity about many kinds of environments and conflicts, economic class as well as race and gender, is what I'd call "intersectionality." (Even if Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term intersectionality after Baldwin's death.)  And I like that he's interested in misogyny and gender double standards, for example, without seeming to be bored-but-dutiful about it.

"Brooklyn Bridge and New York City skyline"
Photo by Irving Underhill, 1911
via Wikimedia Commons

As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:

Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.

He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.

But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are.  I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.

One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.

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I guess that Baldwin's other prose might be more Gesamtkunstwerk-y than Another Country. It was written over a long time with painful effort. Also, there are so many sex scenes! awkward to read in public transit. But I liked it nonetheless.

November 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In October I finished reading Regards from the Dead Princess — the semi-fiction/semi-biography that French journalist Kenizé Mourad wrote about her mother in the 1980s.

Her mother was born into the Sultan's family at the end of the Ottoman Empire, thrown into new lives and places as a princess in India after marriage, and emigrée in Lebanon and Paris, at different periods in her life. She died of an infection during the Second World War when Mourad was a toddler.

Her purpose is, I guess, to paint a picture of her mother and her mother's life in her mind. At the same time she flexes her journalistic scope and personal fascination for 'the Orient' in the historical and geographic details. We hear all about Atatürk and Indian Independence and the German Occupation of Paris, and about what Istanbul and Lucknow and France looked like in those times.

I do think Mourad has the tendency to call a spade — not a spade, but a pearl-handled cake lift. (To re-use a phrase I've read elsewhere.) Her style, or perhaps the style of the translation into English, is reasonably purple.

Her cast of characters also has a tinge of soap opera and to be honest (as a result of her upbringing) I think the heroine tends to depend on or exploit people, or feel victimized by them alternately. Mourad classifies her figures into characters into villains whom the heroine dislikes, villains whom the heroine likes, and heroes who are in the heroine's good graces and heroes who have fallen from their pedestals — for being villainous, or for thwarting the Princess in a more trivial way. Needless to say I find this approach to human nature risky because it can be self-centered and amoral.

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I imagine that the book is an apt reflection of the Princess Diana era:
A fragile-looking, gently-reared, very young aristocratic woman is expected to realize the dreams of at least half her gender.
People believe that these dreams must and will be fulfilled for her,
— precisely because she earns them through her beauty and public benevolence.
But then she reveals herself to be unexpectedly — or expectedly, to any half-skeptical person — unhappy.

***

I reread Elizabeth Acevedo's earlier novel for teenagers, The Poet X, in paper form. The poems felt strikingly personal and fresh, and I appreciated that they were not an equal length, tone or subject. They adapted to their scenarios, were wisely brief where brevity was wit, set a brisk narrative pace, and were well-ripened.

With the Fire on High, which I've finished listening to, offers a (relatively) invigoratingly rebellious look at school, gender double standards, and figuring out how to shift to working/college life. It in my view praises an ideal of personal autonomy in aspects besides the freedom from family expectations that Acevedo championed in The Poet X.

I hope that many teenagers have a chance to read these books, because they might 'find themselves' in the pages. While teenage pregnancy, social backlash to pregnancy, or a burning desire to become a chef were not part of my life, for example, I doubt this would have prevented me from feeling understood and encouraged by With the Fire on High.

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The Pages Choisies from Arthur Rimbaud's works that Larousse published in the 1950s, with notes by Etiemble, was a counterbalance to the edition that I'd read by Claude-Edmonde Magny. It is more risqué and adversarial, and it does not airbrush over Rimbaud's faults. I thought it was not a fair approach, however, because Etiemble seemed unfairly prejudiced. As always, I barely grasped Rimbaud's poems themselves, but since Etiemble refused to agree with the widely accepted ways to read and interpret them, I felt like I was no worse off than anyone else in having no interpretation.

After reading Rimbaud, I wavered between reading more Another Country by James Baldwin; or beginning to read an abridged edition of Souvenirs de la jeunesse et de l'enfance by Ernest Renan, or Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

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"Portrait of Renan in his Study"
via

Wikimedia Commons

I decided on Renan, because his writing and biography were new territory to me. Born into what I think is the middle class in the early 19th century in Brittany, he was intended to become a priest, and worked his way through lesser and greater religious schools and reached Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

But instead of being a priest, he broke off his theological education and became a historian and a society figure, and he contributed articles (like the ones that compose his Souvenirs) to the famous Revue des deux mondes. He broke the heart of priests who educated him by leaving the path of God, publicly. One of these priests apparently only published one book in his lifetime: a refutation of Renan's writings.

But he says that the priests who taught him inculcated a good moral example that left traces anyway. He turned away from the Church due to contradictions within Catholic church dogma (and its pretense that 19th-century rules sprang from the time of Jesus and St. Paul, rather than from hundreds of years of Vatican wheelings and dealings), as well as due to historical and philosophical counter-evidence. It was not due to lurid harassment or abuse, which I'd rather feared.

His tale of schoolmate Noémi 'interested' me from my amateur feminist critic's standpoint. I temporarily agreed with Sherlock Holmes's ideas regarding the heliocentric solar system — there are just things one doesn't need to hear, or hearing them they should be forgotten so as to free up the precious brain cells that are wasted on them. For example: "Très tôt, le goût des jeunes filles fut vif en moi." ('Very soon, I had a lively taste for young girls.') made me reach for the metaphorical brain bleach; it sounds lewd. Hopefully I'm just mistranslating it.

Maybe his priestly training gave Renan a weird concept of female minds. Maybe other reasons did. Whatever the reason, and despite the fact that he was married, I think he might have been better at analyzing the inner lives and talents of Antarctic penguins.

Translated in 1897 by Mynors Bright, here Renan is describing the girls whom he knew before he entered a men-only theological school at the age of 15:

The vague idea which attracted me to the[ girls] was, I think, that men are at liberty to do many things which women cannot, and the latter consequently had, in my eyes, the charm of being weak and beautiful creatures, subject in their daily life to rules of conduct which they did not attempt to override. All those whom I had known were the pattern of modesty. The first feeling which stirred in me was one of pity, so to speak, coupled with the idea of assisting them in their becoming resignation, of liking them for their reserve, and making it easier for them. I quite felt my own intellectual superiority; but even at that early age, I felt that the woman who is very beautiful or very good, solves completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make such a hash. We are mere children or pedants compared to her. I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.

[Bright's translation is here at Wikisource.

The original is here.]

To be fair, there were many weird ideas about women and their role in society at the time. Without searching for it, I came across this in Wikipedia just now:

Camille Saint-Saëns wrote of Holmès in the journal Harmonie et Mélodie: "Like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmès is a woman, an extremist."

["Augusta Holmès", Wikipedia]

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As for modern books: Carmen Maria Machado, the author, is about to release In the Dream House: A Memoir, a new book that uses elements from other genres like horror to portray her relationship with a psychologically abusive woman.

As for anniversaries, the Guardian has mentioned that French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes will have dreamt his 'night of three dreams' 400 years ago on November 10th. Also, that George Eliot's 200th birthday will fall on the 22nd. Perhaps it's a good time to tackle the Discourse on the Method or Middlemarch...

October 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In October there are also new books that any reader who keeps up with the scene can hardly avoid hearing about. Zadie Smith is presenting fresh and perennial short stories in a volume called Grand Union, John Le Carré is publishing the spy novel Agent Running in the Field as mentioned in September, and Philip Pullman is adding The Secret Commonwealth to his Golden Compass books.

In the US, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey have written the book She Said about researching and publishing their news articles about film producer Harvey Weinstein's harassment and abuse.

(A Washington Post article about the rough interview with Bob Woodward at the book launch in Washington, D.C. is here.)

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Meanwhile, I am planning to finish listening to With the Fire on High (the young adult book about a Philadelphia high school student who dreams of becoming a professional chef) by Elizabeth Acevedo, and finish reading Regards from the Dead Princess by Kenizé Mourad.

After that, to read more of Another Country by James Baldwin and Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson in the new English-language translation, and a Larousse paperback volume of Pages choisies by Arthur Rimbaud.

In Berlin's Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, I've spotted Ayesha At Last, which I've been curious about for a while. It is a romance novel inspired by Pride and Prejudice. It was written in the setting of present-day Toronto, by Uzma Jalaluddin. Its Austenite and Canadian elements draw me, and I'm interested in Muslim life in modern North American and European cities. But I haven't bought it yet.

At the Kulturkaufhaus, I bought Ronja Rövardottar by Astrid Lindgren, to reward my efforts in learning Swedish on Duolingo. But I suspect that a competent dictionary is needed.

Then I've begun regularly reading O megalos peripatos tou Petrou, by Alki Zei. (It's a classic Greek children's story, written in the 1970s and set in 1940s Greece during the Second World War. Despite its subject matter, it is also rather funny.) My Greek colleague is helping by reading it together with me on Thursday afternoons. She has been explaining, for example, the historical context and vocabulary.

Lastly, I want to read more of Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay backlist.

In short, there will be no lack of books to read in October.