Backlisted - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

North and South is Elizabeth Gaskell’s fourth novel and considered by many to be her best. It tells the story of Margaret Hale, a principled young middle-class woman from the rural South whose family are obliged to re-settle in the Northern industrial town of Milton. Joining us to discuss the novel’s contemporary relevance, are two new guests: Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Nell Stevens, author of the memoir, Mrs Gaskell & Me. We cover the books presentation of labour relations at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the changing position of women in society, the reasons for Elizabeth Gaskell’s uncertain reputation, her unsentimental treatment of death and – spoiler alert – whether the novel’s ending works. Also in this episode, Andy is impressed by No Document, Australian writer Anwen Crawford’s ground-breaking work of elegiac non-fiction and John enjoys the exquisite imagination on display in Chloe Ardijis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist, the Mexican novelist’s recent collection of stories, essays and pen portraits. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 04:20 - No Document by Anwen Crawford. 10:40 - Dialogue with a Somnambulist by Chloe Aridjis. 16:42 - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today you find us on a busy street in a northern town sometime in the 1850s. The brick-built houses are terraced and regular. Behind them tower large, many-windowed factories, each of them puffing out black smoke, contributing to the deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon. Trucks and wagons heavily loaded with bales of calico and bags of raw cotton rumble past. The footpaths are thronged with busy people on their way to work. A tall, dark-haired woman crosses the road in front of us, hugging her shawl around her shoulders. I'm John Mitchinson,

the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by two guests making their backlisted debuts, Jennifer Egan and Nell Stephens. Hello, Nell Stephens and Jennifer Egan. Hello. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels, including A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time magazine and Entertainment Weekly. The double. Congratulations, Jennifer. Thank you. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit from the Goon Squad, was published in April by Corsair in the UK and Scribner in the US

and was recently chosen as one of President Obama's favourite books of the year. Do they tell you that in advance or do you find it out when the rest of us find out, Jennifer? Probably after the rest of us find out, Jennifer. Probably after the rest of us find out. Okay. It was a great surprise. Do you get any more than just it's on his reading list? Do you get notes from the former president? No, I wish.

One of my kids said, well, now can we have dinner with him? It hasn't reached that point. It's a wonderful book, wonderful novel. Nell Stephens writes memoir and fiction, and her debut novel, Briefly, A Delicious Life, was published earlier this year by Picador in the UK and Scribner in the US. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs. Gaskell and Me.

That's a pot of luck. What a coincidence. Published as The Victorian and The Romantic in North America, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Nell is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick. She lives in Oxford with her wife and son.

And we have no proof that Prime Minister Liz Truss has enjoyed your work. But perhaps she has. Way to rub it in, Andy. Let's say it's about to appear on her list. We did talk about Bleecker House, or I talked about it. I chose Bleecker House as one of my books on the 44th edition of Backlisted back in the day.

The one on the Charles Sprawson episode, if you can remember that far back, Andy. Haunts of the Black Masseur. That's it. Well, that sounds like a natural pairing, John. No. An episode I chiefly remember because our guest, Alex, suggested I might like to go wild swimming

as preparation for it. The fool. Securely, we've never met Alex because the fool. No, I don't want to do that. John, take us in. Well, the book that we are here to discuss, if you haven't already guessed, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. First

serialised in Household Words, the magazine edited by Charles Dickens from September 1854 to January 1855. But it also appeared in volume form with extra chapters from Chapman and Hall publishers in 1855. But before we don our clogs and investigate trouble at Mill, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Couldn't resist. I'm issuing a preemptive apology for the

accents that are gonna land you may not get them we'll see i've been reading a book um by the australian writer anwin crawford called no document and um this is a very interesting, moving, experimental memoir which works rather like collage, I think. Amon Crawford is an Australian critic and she writes about culture. She's a fan of the band The Cléontel which endears her to me immediately. And she draws in this book on her background in poetry and in visual art to create a kind of layered picture of, how can I put this?

It's an exploration of loss. No document is an exploration of loss. of loss no document is an exploration of loss and there's a sense it within the book of everything happening simultaneously john do you know what i mean that different parts of experience memory cultural life political life uh love friendship memoir all feed into one another and i found this tremendously interesting because i'm a great believer that as you know we've talked about this before that we don't process art purely via other art nor do we process memory purely via other memory that we we are as human beings we we um collide and collate our experiences um without compartmentalizing them and the thing that i very much liked about anwin crawford's book is that it attempts to capture in coll, that collision of memory, culture, reality, whatever that is, imagination, whatever that is, in a way that is both haunting and haunted. feels like a um requiem but also a uh an imaginarium that's nice for undeveloped stories that the people in the book may have lived but didn't get to live so i found it incredibly

interesting experimental very moving um i think i'm just going to read a bit because in a sense it's a hard book to talk about but a wonderful book to read from. So this is from about just before halfway through the book. I want you to imagine that laid out on the page are a series of discrete sentences or paragraphs. So I'll try and put a little space between each one. or paragraphs, so I'll try and put a little space between each one. There isn't one photograph of us facing the camera. Retrospectively, it has become more obvious to me, though we were not unaware of it then, that the artists we admired were, by and large, people who died young. Such an impulse isn't rare at age 19, but for you at least, an early death was neither an abstraction nor a romance.

The exocrine glands affected by cystic fibrosis include the bronchi, the intestines and the pancreas. Exocrine comes from the Greek, crinine, to separate. Yes, I cannot say you wholly died of this. You loved the artist Gordon Matter-Clark, who cut into buildings, who split a house in half. I change tents and travel back across your death's border. You love the artist Gordon Matter-Clark. Wrote Franz Marc to his friend Paul Klee on the 12th of June 1914. I'm still convinced that I won't paint my best pictures until I'm 40 or 50. I'm not yet ready in myself for this.

I don't think I ever grasped the full implications of your illness, which was chronic and progressive while you lived. It was easy not to think about. Having sought autonomy, which I have thought meant holding to the chance that I might kill myself, my life has been remote. Matt O'Clark's Super 8 film Splitting, 1974, begins as if it took place in rooms apart from me, with a tilt shot up the front steps to a notice at the entrance to a house that reads, Do not occupy.

And only years later do I realise I was there. I knew that you would die young. I didn't know it at all. I'm not yet ready in myself for this. So that is From No Document by Anwen Crawford, which I, even as i am reading it to you then i find myself very moved i find it very very powerful book it doesn't have a uk publisher if any uk publishers are listening to this you could get on this you can import it to the uk the us you can get it australia you can get it if you were comparing it you know the usual cheesy publisher thing to do but if you were comparing it her writing to anyone.

I can't because it's not like something. It's its own thing. And I can give you no higher recommendation than that. So yeah, No Document by Anne Wynne Crawford, published by Transit Books in the US. Hunt it down, everyone. John Mitchinson, what have you been reading this week? I've got another unplaceable book by the Mexican writer based in London called Chloe Arichi,

who has written three novels, three prize-winning novels. But what I picked up and liked the look of was a book called Dialogue with a Synambulist, stories, essays in a portrait gallery. So it's short stories, essays, mostly on kind of art and literature. And she's Mexican, but she lives in London and she writes in English and she travels. It's one of those books that makes me feel like I am in a room of European, Latin American writers. And I just needed something to get me out of my garden, as it were. And she

writes particularly well about, if this doesn't sound too pretentious, liminal states. She writes about sleepwalking. She writes about dreaming. She writes about insomnia. It's a brilliant essay on insomnia. She's also very, very good on the strangeness of the natural world. There's a brilliant little short story about a flea circus. The opening, the synambulist in the opening story is a waxwork in a museum that comes to life. There's a woman who eats sea monkeys. You know, those little things used to, used to in the back of-

Yes, in Marvel comics. There's Mexican wrestling. There's a marvellous short piece about the notes from a conference on lightning strike survivors. So it's surreal. She was a friend of Leonora Carrington and curated an exhibition. And there's a wonderful essay, two wonderful essays about Leonora Carrington in the book. It's a beautiful small book published by House Sparrow Press, who publish one book a year.

They're a micro-press, self-confessed micro-press, and this was their 2021 book. Beautiful, beautiful. As a publisher, it's my dream, one really good book a year. One book a year, really lean into it, yeah. Anyway, here we go. There's a pigeon loose on a tube train in the story, so you have to imagine that. There's a tube train, there's a narrator who's obviously just come out of hospital with her mother and everybody's being a little bit freaked out by this pigeon. Here we go.

N is the main character. It was shortly after this, N would never forget, that the pigeon flew right into the centre of the telegraph. There's a man sitting next to her reading the Daily Telegraph. Without blinking, the man in the pinstripe suit laid down his paper and within what seemed like a fraction of a second, grabbed the bird. The whole carriage was now watching. And with his fat knuckles, snapped its neck. It was a clean snap, expertly done, as if he'd been snapping birds' necks his whole life. One second, the pigeon had been tense and a quiver. The next, it was an immobile lump of grey.

Whatever its journey across the city had been, it ended here. The man deposited the courts on the empty seat next to him, picked up his paper, and continued to read. The act was met with silence. Everyone simply stared at the dead bird, just stared and stared, as if pulled together, the intensity of their gaze might resurrect it. For a few seconds, Anne fought the impulse to pick up the pigeon and take it outside to bury. The sanitation people would surely just toss it in a bin, but the thought of touching the thing made her queasy. She imagined what it would feel like to hold the feathery corpse, still warmed by its recent life force, and wasn't sure what was more overpowering, her distress at witnessing such brutality, or the guilty flicker of avulsion she'd begun to feel. As if in quiet defeat, the pigeon's head lay to one side like the emblem on a fallen coat of arms.

Its eye had almost immediately turned white, or perhaps it was the eyelid that had closed, and its legs, already stiff, looked like little pink twigs that could easily break off. N turned to look at her mother, who continued staring at the bird, willing her to say something, anything, but no. She kept whatever she was thinking to herself, hands in lap, fingers interlocked. At the following station, which was open air, the businessman folded his paper, picked up his briefcase and stepped out. The doors of the tube took a moment to close and as they stuttered shut, N gazed out at the sky and the platform and the spaces in between, seized by the urge to grab her bag and run for it in whatever direction opened up to her.

But she remained in her seat and with one strong tug unzipped her jacket for the temperature inside the carriage suddenly felt very warm. Okay. Wonderful. Really lovely collection and interesting and not really like anyone else.

I mean, you know, she's got marvellous quotes from Claire Louise Bennett and Lynn Tillman. But I think she's, yeah, I love writers who are from one culture and living in another and writing in a language which is not. And the book is, I really, really enjoyed it. And it's published by House Sparrow Press, the micro publisher, and available, certainly available. I saw it, I was struck by its kind of austere cover

in the London Review of Books, but it's available from House Sparrow Press online and probably in all good bookshops. Gosh, books are great. I like them. Just as well. We've already talked about two absolute bangers. Hooray. Shall we listen to something that will transport us back through time?

Let's hope. Good Lord, it's as though we're in the 1850s. Oh, bless you, Governor. Chestnut, sir. You can hear those urchins in the 1850s. Oh, bless you, governor. Chestnut, sir. You could hear those urchins. That was tremendously good, Tess. Thank you very much. I'm just wafting away the smoke,

the authentic smoke from this chimney there. We'll be back in just a sec. It's time for us to turn to the main event. North and South was Elizabeth Gaskell's fourth novel and is considered by many to be her best. It tells the story of Margaret Hale, a young middle-class woman from the lush rural South whose family are obliged to resettle

in the northern industrial town of Milton. Usually considered a social novel, it's often compared to Dickens' Hard Times and Charlotte Monty Shirley, both of which preceded it. The case of Hard Times is just the year before. Gaskell's critical reputation has waxed and waned over the years, but the presentation of Margaret, a strong, compassionate, and deeply principled heroine who must struggle with the most mostly unlooked for attention of suitors, including the broodingly efficient mill owner John Thornton. The deaths of those close to her are the simmering cauldron of labour relations

at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Margaret's presentation has won the book many fans in recent years. It has been adapted for television three times, most successfully in 2004 in a BBC production, now legendary BBC production, written by Sandy Gray and featuring memorable performances by Daniela Denby-Ash and Richard Armitage in the main roles. So Jennifer, you chose North and South for us, for which many thanks. When did you first read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South for us, for which many thanks. When did you first read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South? You know, it wasn't long ago. She's very little read here. In fact,

British 19th century generally is very little read here, which I think is such a shame. And I'm working actively to try to combat that. I actually assigned Barchester Towers Trollope's second novel in my undergraduate literature course at the University of Pennsylvania. And I'm not sure anyone had heard of him in that class before. So I kind of came to her, I guess, via Trollope. I've been reading a lot of Trollope in the last few years and Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, wanting to read more women of the 19th century and so I just went straight to north and south and I actually first uh read it as an audiobook it's read by uh Juliet Stevenson absolutely brilliantly agree I agree I've been listening to that exact version of the last week or so and you know what's so great about it is that the dialect is really hard for me, especially as an American, to even construct in the physical book, which I

also have and read this time in preparation for our conversation. I felt in a way that I was so glad I had Juliet Stevens's voice in my head to help me with that dialect, to actually help me know what it would sound like. But I was really struck by so many things about North and South, how overtly political it is, in some ways, even more than Trollope, whose great subject was power. But I feel like she's really, her characters discuss economic theory, you know, quite overtly. She doesn't provide easy answers, but she's right in there with questions that are totally relevant, at least here in America today, and arguments that still have not been resolved. And the final thing I'll say about the first reading that I had of it is

that there's a great set piece in the middle of the novel that I know we're going to talk about, sort of right in the middle, in which Margaret Hale, the heroine, averts violence by basically walking into the middle of it and saying, don't fight. And this is really a fantasy I used to have as a little girl. I would think, you know, wars are so terrible. You know, I grew up during, I was a little girl during the Vietnam War. And I thought, why can't I just walk out there and tell them, don't fight? Wouldn't they stop if I did that? So this, I had kind of forgotten about that, you know, in retrospect, somewhat ludicrous fantasy, but there was something really thrilling about seeing it dramatized in a credible way.

Oh, wow. Well, that, goodness me. That's a great setup. way. Oh, wow. Well, that, goodness me. I agree with you, Jennifer. One of the things I really found remarkable about this novel is we're used to thinking of the issues this raises in relation to what we've come to call late capitalism. So it's sort of disconcerting to read them in early capitalism, or at least mid-period capitalism being exactly the same uh present defined still unresolved 150 nearly 200 years later right it's i agree with you the relevance of it is is remarkable now now i imagine you have an answer to this question i've got a couple yeah so yeah just a couple use both sides of the paper if necessary.

When did you first read the work of Elizabeth Gaskell? I first read Mary Barton as a teenager. I was on a massive Victorian novel kick and was reading everything fairly indiscriminately at that point. And at the time it made I would say a medium impression it didn't kind of sit with me as particularly I was more excited by Elliot and probably Austin at the time but I kind of I had read her as as one of the Victorian novelists but I sort of stayed aware during university and funnily enough I think I first

read North and South in graduate school in the US so some of us were exposed to it there but I really kind of met her as I like to think of it or became somewhat obsessed with her when I first read the letters which was I was in my mid-20s and I am someone who is often finding themselves to really like letters more than the novels of lots of writers and she is absolutely one of those writers for me that I love her letters beyond reason really and and a lot of the novels I don't feel that way about North and South I do love fairly uncomplicatedly can you just expand on that a little for listeners as to what the letters give you that the fiction doesn't humour predominantly she is so funny she's such a funny person and that's it's there in some of the fiction but it's it's absolutely unfettered in the letters

she is incredibly sharp my favorite letter of hers she writes to george elliott at a point when george elliott's identity is still not publicly known and she says people keep asking me if if i wrote your novel and since you don't want anyone to know that it was you, are we both cool if I just say it was me? She's mischievous and she's funny and she's so sharp. And I think in part that is so brilliant to see because of her reputation, which I'm sure we will talk about, and the way that she was received at the time and the kind of enduring repercussions of that as you know considering her a lesser a lesser victorian novelist essentially so for me the letters were what sparked a real love affair with her and that was that was in my mid-20s why do i know her as mrs gaskell and elizkell. Is it a Victorian trope?

They used to refer to Queen Victoria as Mrs. Grundy on the throne. I think there's a kind of thing, it's like a sort of Victorian matter familias thing. David Cecil, the critic in the early 20th century, said she wasn't man enough really to write about social problems and that she made a creditable effort to overcome her deficiencies,

the deficiency being that she was a woman. So there's always been a slight... Thanks, Dave. And I sort of, you kind of feel it's an interesting thing, isn't it? That she's maybe not as brilliant as George Eliot and not as weird as the Brontes. But it's why I love her. And she's not maybe as, you know, people often compare North and South to Pride and Prejudice.

In fact, there was a terrible competition where they got people to rewrite Pride and Prejudice in the style of Mrs. Gaskell, where they, you know, basically it's just Pride and Prejudice in the style of Mrs Gaskell where they you know basically it's just Pride and Prejudice with lots and lots and lots of long descriptions of things. Now why do we call her Mrs Gaskell? We don't call her the Mrs Elliot or Ms Austen. Why do we call her Mrs Gaskell? I think it is part of an effort to confine her to the domestic to make her a slightly easier package to understand, that she participated in. And is that how she would have been, sorry, forgive me,

is that how she would have been published originally? So when Dickens publishes her in Household Words, is it more orthodox to present her as Mrs. Gaskell to a paying public? Well, initially she's not given a name. It's by the author of North and South. Right. But she owns not given a name. It's by the author of North and South. Right. But she owns Mrs. Gaskell.

And I think part of what makes her so intriguing to me is she embodies this really difficult tension between really having quite radical views on some things. Or she's in lots of ways more radical than the combination of her circumstances and her imagination will allow and so she moves back and forth between having quite controversial opinions and writing these books that were certainly shocking and then retreating and being incredibly upset when everyone was horrified by what she'd written and you know she writes Cranford and she writes these novels of manners as well. And that's a tension in her. And I think there's some security in Mrs. Gaskell, even for her. But also there is this, and I was going to talk about Lord Cecil as well, this reputation that she had in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century as being a domestic author so he writes you know she was all woman was expected to be gentle domestic tactful unintellectual prone to tears easily shocked I mean most of that is just it couldn't be further from who she was

she was actually quite hard to shock but that has. Mrs. Gaskell was a typical Victorian woman, he wrote, and that's really difficult to shake off. One thing I find kind of strange, though, is that naming and stating women's names was obviously really important to her. Her first book was called Mary Barton. She wanted to call North and South Margaret Hale, and Dickens talked her out of it. And he was the one who chose the title North and South. So the idea of stating a woman's full name, her maiden name, was obviously really a critical idea, a statement of identity and enough so that you could build a book around it for her. You know what, listeners? When we record this, you can't see what's happening that I can see.

But on screen, we ask people to put their hands up and they've got something to say. And literally everybody's got their hands up. This conversation is already on fire. We're only 10 minutes in. Nell. Really, just to jump on the Dickens thing, he has this incredibly bad habit of renaming

her work for her and making it i think worse you know they okay so give us some examples then for me that the example that rankles most was she wrote uh i think it's a novella really that she wanted to call a night's work and because because he likes hamming things up and making things slightly more dramatic, he renames it a dark night's work. And it becomes just so easy. And the same with North and South, right? If you call it Margaret Hale, then this is a novel about this incredibly complicated figure who is constantly moving between binaries of different kinds and between oppositionary forces.

And then you call it North and South and it becomes about the binary. It's a completely different framing of the book. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. OK. I mean, just to add on that, I mean, I think I know this is not really what we do on this show but it's a significantly I think more successful novel than Hard Times which is my least favorite Dickens novel but we'll leave that to one side but I think I'm guessing oh will we oh will we yeah well that you you I'm guessing that what I'm guessing and walk away yeah I'm guessing that what he was what he was doing

was sort of trying to position it more as a kind of social political novel. So are you defending him as a publisher? I'm maybe defending him as a publisher, although I agree. I think he was heavy handed. They started to really rub one another up the wrong way, didn't they?

He started to go on about her being conceited and heavy. But there's a great line of Virginia Woolf's, going back to Mrs. Gaskell. You know what a snob Virginia Woolf was. What a modest, capable woman, she wrote. And then a fortnight later, she's saying, what I object to in the mid-Victorians is their instinctive fluency,

as if Mrs. G sat down to write with a cat on her knee. I really agree with you about Dickens, whom I adore, but there really are good and bad people in Dickens. There are a lot of binaries in his work, and he works with them beautifully. But the thing that's really amazing about North and South, and I felt this more the second time I read it, none of the binaries hold up. They are presented to be undermined. So there is a kind of complexity and mystery that inheres in this book that I think is really singular, actually, in her generation. And so I agree that North and South, I agree with Nell that it really is a kind of mislead. Well, it's actually in some ways not a bad title if we see it as a binary to be undermined,

a sort of false presentation. Because the truth is that she does not provide any easy answers. It's not strictly socialist. She's not necessarily in favour of unions. Everything that she presents is ultimately turned on its head or at least on its side, and that's one of the things I love about it. Jennifer, could you give us a couple of examples of the binaries you're thinking of within the novel? So, for instance, I guess, well guess, well, it's not even, as you say, it's not north versus south, is it? It's north. It's not actually much south. It's mostly just north, right? So, but what other binaries are there in the novel? Well, almost immediately we encounter a world in which workers are being clearly struggling,

can't feed their children, and openly disrespected by the sort of ruling class, Thornton being the one that we know best. And there's a moment where he describes very succinctly the fact that the poor are responsible for their poverty, that this is a world where anyone who wants to get ahead can. And he actually says, it is one of the great beauties of our system that a working man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behavior, that in fact, everyone who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct and attention

to his duties comes over to our ranks. It may not always be as a master, but as an overlooker, a cashier, a bookkeeper, a clerk, one on the side of authority and order. And Margaret responds, you consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world from whatever cause as your enemies then, if I understand you rightly. And he says, as their own enemies, certainly. Well, there you have the central argument of the Republican Party in American politics. That's it in a nutshell. And so we see that this is absolutely wrong. I mean, in the end, Thornton and Higgins form an alliance. So in the end, it feels to me like it's a book that is actually about the impossibility of binaries in an ever-changing world. To me, it's a book explicitly

about change. I saw that more clearly when I reread it, which is a much more subtle and interesting topic. Just on the big binary of, you know, you mentioned, you say rightly, Andy, that it's not really North and South, it's mostly North. But I don't think you can underestimate how important the Helston chapter is at the beginning, this lush Hampshire countryside where she's happy and it's beautiful and everything seems to work. She, there's a brilliant scene with Higgins, the working man whose family she befriends towards the end of the book when he says,

I'm going to go down south and get work. And she says, no, don't do that. You won't get work. It will be, it's really not, I know I've painted it as paradise, but, don't do that. You won't get work. It will be, it's really not. I know I've painted it as paradise, but it isn't paradise. And then, interestingly, one of the chapters she writes to put in the book that Dickens didn't serialise in Household Words is her return with, what's his name?

Mr. Bell. Bell. Goes with Mr. Bell bell she goes back to helston and helston has changed it isn't it hasn't stayed the same it sort of got worse and that there's it's like the shire yeah it is like it's exactly like this so and i think she did that i mean you've made me think that maybe she was doing that to undermine the title just a little bit, that actually the binaries aren't binary, as Jennifer said. I've got a question now. Why does this novel then, why does the novel North and South have two false starts, if that's what they are? that's what they are. I'm on board with that reading. I like that reading because it sits so neatly with the complexities I see in Gaskell as she's grappling with what kind of writer she

is, right? That she has been castigated for writing these social problem novels. You know, the manufacturers in her husband's church are very upset with her for writing Mary Barton, for example example and everyone is scandalized that she wrote ruth which is this kind of empathetic and really detailed exploration of a quote-unquote fallen woman right and she's she's scandalized everybody and then she writes cranford which is a novel of manners and maybe more in line with what people might expect a Victorian female writer to write. And then we get these, well, people call them the false starts, right? The false starts of North and South. And the opening of North and South is unbelievably frothy.

It is just the ultimate domestic scene of these women preparing for a wedding and there's fabric everywhere and her cousin is kind of curled up for a nap and it really she could be describing a kitten right it's just incredibly um frilly for want of a better word and so you if you've just read Cranford you might think right okay we're in a certain kind of book here and then there are just these series of twists where we're told oh no it's not going to be that novel right and and she's upended from London which is where the novel begins and she's sent to this rural pastoral idyll with her parents in Helston and then of course we get a proposal from someone who's come from London to propose to her and it's almost as though the novel's kind of saying you sure are you sure we don't want weddings right

are you sure yeah that's that's now that's exactly what I felt when I was reading it I was thinking wait a minute this keeps moving this is like a moving target. Boy, she doesn't want weddings. Margaret does not want weddings, no. And then, of course, we get another twist where we find out that her father has various religious doubts. I mean, he's giving up his position in the church and they are moving north. And then we get north and then a different novel altogether starts and it is back in the terrain that upsets everybody where she is thinking about industrial relations, which everyone thinks she shouldn't be doing. Is it right to say that if we put this back into context

that the novel of the industrial North when this was published was not a thing? So to contemporary readers readers would it have been more shocking to have been presented with certainly if they were from the south with a documentary account to some extent of what conditions were like in manchester and thereabout i don't i don't want to make say an absolute thing because it will almost certainly be wrong, but I don't think anyone was doing it the way Gaskell is doing it. Obviously, the Brontes are doing their own thing. And that is novels of the North. But, you know, there's a different tone there.

I think she was certainly in a fairly unique position as being someone who was accepted in the sort of London literary circles and who was nonetheless writing these novels about the industrial north. I think that was fairly unusual. Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm really glad you say that because I'm not, and you've obviously read far more of the letters, but she was, she was, she was very much a connector of people.

Wasn't she? She was, I was joking earlier that she'd been like, reminds me a bit like the Tina Brown. She knows everybody and she puts everybody in touch with everybody else. And she's, she writes letters and she writes great journalism. And she's,

I think that's one of the things that the, the Mrs. Gaskell thing kind of holds you back, that she was a player, you know, in the literary scene of the mid-19th century. I've got some letters here. Would you like to hear a very short excerpt from three of her correspondence about North and South?

We've got a letter here from Charlotte Bronte. I don't know if you've heard of her. Charlotte Bronte to Elizabeth Gaskell. Written on the 30th of September, 1854, Charlotte Bronte writes, What has appeared I like well and better each fresh number. Best of all the last today's. The subject seems to be difficult. At first I groaned over it. If you had any narrowness of views or bitterness of feeling towards the church or her clergy I should groan over it still but I think I see the ground you're about to take as far as the church

is concerned not that of attack on her but of defense of those who conscientiously differ from her and feel it a duty to leave her fold well it is good ground but still rugged for the step of fiction this is some this is how it is amazing to think that the human being, Charlotte Bronte, did actually write like this in a letter. But anyway, stony, thorny it will prove at times, I fear. It seems to me that you understand well the genius of the North. And that's a capital G on genius, right?

We've also got a letter here from Florence Nightce nightingale to elizabeth gaskell about north and south she says by the by i must say what a deal of wisdom there seems to be in n and s it has instructed me exceedingly you hold the balance very evenly and it must be a hard task i am quite sorry to part with it and wish it had not ended so soon or so abruptly, but that I'm afraid you are right, for I'm afraid Margaret will not be happy. Though she will make him so, he is too old to mould and the poetry of her nature will suffer under the iron mark which has so compressed him so long. And then finally, Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing on the 24th of May, 1856. I must say in closing that I and my twin daughters read your North and South with so much enthusiasm that it was decreed at the time that Mama should write you an expression of thanks.

But time, as he often does, stole the pen till the memory of first love was passed. But I will not deny myself the memory of it now i hope to be in england and somewhere we may meet you have made me cry very unfairly over mary barton when i bought the book to amuse myself but i bear no malice for that so johnny i think you're right she's like this is what this fake Mrs. Gaskell persona might be useful or not useful. I don't know. But she is connected and a player.

And she was a traveller too right now. She went, she was, you know. She went, I mean, she would love to have been more of a traveller. Her husband didn't like to leave home and he didn't like foreign food. So he didn't ever want to go with her. And he was, he was Unitarian minister.'s right yeah William he was kind kind of like Mr Hale in the in the book he liked to stay in his study in Manchester and every now and then he would go on a walking holiday to Scotland but um she she would have liked to have a very

different kind of life I mean she didn't she really didn't want to stay in Manchester. That was a huge part of her life that she was there. And she found it difficult. And so all of the yearning for Helston in North and South, I think is, you know, is coming from a real place for her. And in fact, at the end of her life, she secretly, without telling him, buys a house in Hampshire. And she, you know, she's got money by that point because she's a very successful novelist. And she buys this house in Hampshire and she you know she's got money by that point

because she's a very successful novelist and she buys this house in secret and says don't tell don't tell him yet that I've done this but I've bought this house and she takes her daughters to see it and she dies there before they move in but she was always yearning to move that was her all over and she she went to Italy and loved Italy and she desperately wanted to go to America she never got to go and that was a huge fantasy of hers that she would she would get to travel there she's unusual I think as a writer in that she was a massive extrovert she she liked parties she liked people and she like you say, she liked to be connected. That was who she was.

Jennifer. You know, it's interesting because the thing that comes through, I mean, to me, it's such a loving portrait of the North, not aesthetically, but in terms of the power and the strength that we find there. And Margaret herself, Margaret Hale, is such a strong person. I mean, that every, or maybe another way to put that is she's surrounded by people who are completely ineffectual. Repeatedly, when bad news has to be delivered, it's Margaret. Her father cannot tell her mother

that he's leaving the church and his job and that they're moving to another place. leaving the church and his job and that they're moving to another place. She has to tell Higgins that his daughter is dead. And then when the neighbor commits suicide, Higgins is too afraid to tell the widow that her husband's dead. Margaret has to do that. I mean, everyone around her is so cowardly and she does everything. So I feel like there's such a fascination with strength, with personal agency and the ability to say, I will do it and just do it. So it's really interesting now to hear about what she was like as a person, Elizabeth Gaskell herself, because there's such an admiration for that kind of agency that's really manifest in this book. And to the degree that there is a kind of binary that I think does hold, there's such a sense that the North is the locus of that

strength and that power of change. And it's fascinating that you say that she wanted to go to America because her descriptions of the North and the people there remind me a lot of descriptions of other Victorian writers of America. And I'm thinking of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I just read recently by Dickens, where there's an incredibly unflattering portrait of America. Everyone's always picking their teeth and they can't have a decent conversation. All they want to do is make money and i'm even thinking back to fanny trollop so much earlier but her travelogue of america uh this is trollop's mother which was a runaway bestseller and it is scathing in its depiction of americans she talks about them like stabbing

their food with their knives and eating it it It's called domestic manners of the Americans. And it is... I shouldn't laugh. Some of this holds so true to today, I'm sorry to say. But what comes through in the middle of it all, the lack of manners is somehow related to this kind of furious energy. The two seem to go together. And there's grudging admiration for the energy, even amidst the horror at the manors. Energy. You use the word energy, Jennifer.

That's very interesting. You see, one of the things I found interesting reading North and South here in the year 2022 is the energy that comes off the page is very surprising for a for a victorian novel this sort of lip service paid to sedate behavior but actually what she wants to do is really lean into the narrative and really play those scenes for all the power as you another word you've just used jennifer that they potentially have within them i'd just like to read a little bit if i may from a scene and you'll think i'm

joking i'm not joking but this this is a scene that reminded me of an equivalent in the 1960s film night of the living dead which is one of the proto zombie films where a small group of people are constrained in a shack while around them uh they don't even know they're called this is such an early zombie film they're not really called zombies in this film but anyway they're they're being menaced and the scenario here in 1854 is a group of women are trapped in a house being menaced by a mob so again the zombie thing is not misplaced it's the idea that the individuals have been subsumed into a threatening mass okay so i'm just going to read a little bit from this. And this is this is the real stuff. That's what I'm going to say. They're at the gates. Call John. Fanny, call him from the mill. They're at the gates. They'll batter them in. Call John, I say.

And simultaneously, the gathering tramp to which she had just been listening instead of heeding Margaret's words was heard just right outside the wall. instead of heeding Margaret's words, was heard just right outside the wall, and an increasing din of angry voices raged behind the wooden barrier, which shook as if the unseen maddened crowd made battering rams of their bodies, and retreated a short space only to come with more united steady impetus against it till their great beats made the strong gates quiver like reeds before the wind. The women gathered round the windows, fascinated to look on the scene which terrified them. Mrs Thornton, the women's servants, Margaret, all were there. Fanny had returned, screaming upstairs as if pursued at every step, and had thrown herself in hysterical sobbing on the sofa. step and had thrown herself in hysterical sobbing on the sofa. Mrs Thornton watched for her son, who was still in the mill. He came out, looked up at them, the pale cluster of faces, and smiled

good courage to them before he locked the factory door. Then he called to one of the women to come down and undo his own door, which Fanny had fastened behind her in her mad flight, Mrs Thornton herself went, and the sound of his well-known and commanding voice seemed to have been like the taste of blood to the infuriated multitude outside. Hitherto they had been voiceless, wordless, needing all their breath for their hard labouring efforts to break down the gates, but now, hearing him speak inside, they set up such a fierce unearthly groan that even Mrs Thornton was white with fear as she preceded him into the room. He came in a little flushed, but his eyes gleaming as in answer to the trumpet call of danger, and with a proud look of defiance on his face that made him a noble,

trumpet call of danger and with a proud look of defiance on his face that made him a noble if not a handsome man. Margaret had always dreaded lest her courage should fail her in any emergency and she should be proved to be and what she dreaded lest she was coward but now in this real great time of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself and felt only an intense sympathy, intense to painfulness in the interests of the moment. Now, I think that is an extremely exciting piece of prose. But also what I really like about it, Jennifer, is it manages to both be both political and apolitical. You know, she manages to define where the power relationships are in that without making you feel necessarily that the mob is inherently evil or wrong. It's a group of individuals enraged beyond reasonable levels. of individuals enraged beyond reasonable levels. Yeah, and it's interesting that in fact, it is really complicated because this mob is defying its union, which wanted them to go more slowly

because public opinion was actually in favor of the workers. But because of this violence that ends up erupting, public opinion turns against the workers and the people who were part of the mob, including Boucher, the neighbor of Higgins, Margaret's friend, are ultimately, you know, really, everyone's furious with them. So it is really complicated. It's not as simple as, oh, the workers are rising up. No, the organized entity of the workers is trying to operate in a very rational way. And the anger explodes in this mob. And now that's part of the fascination of the book for me. Like I was thinking of it in relation to the Ragged trouser philanthropists which is a both ideologically pure and deeply flawed artistic novel right because one because of the other the

the artistry is compromised by the ideological rigor of it whereas north and south is a fascinatingly um binary yet non-binary explanation exploration of that thing we've just been talking about. It's nuance within a binary framework. And that's what she's grappling with, I think, in huge part because of the reception of her earlier novels. I think there's sort of sometimes surprising nuances, and I'm sure we'll talk about the ending and the way that this novel kind of wraps up for want of a better way um and for me I guess some of some of the weaknesses of the novel I think are are when she Gaskell is thinking about the kinds of responses that she's

had to her work um particularly you know people who in fact maybe i'll read a little bit um someone writes to her um and says why don't you write a novel from the perspective of the masters you know you've written from the perspective of the workers and that's fine but why don't you write about the masters and then you know do that side of it and she writes back saying several people whose opinion i very much respected have suggested this subject fine but why don't you write about the masters and you know do that side of it and she writes back saying several people whose opinion I very much respected have suggested this subject but after a good deal of thought I feel that if it is to be done it must be by someone else in the first place whatever power there was in Mary Barton was caused by my feeling strongly on the side which I

took now as I don't feel as strongly and it is impossible I ever would on the other side the forced effort of writing on that side would end in a weak failure. I know and have always owned that I have represented but one side of the question and no one would welcome more than I should a true and earnest representation of the other side and that's such an interesting line she's trying to tread in that letter. And I think the line that she's trying to tread in the North and South, actually, because, of course, who ends up owning the mill at the end of the novel? But Margaret, right? And who ends up being...

Hey, hey, stop. Spoilers, everybody. We apologise for that. We apologise for that. Am I not allowed to talk about the end? You've had like 165 years to get up to speed, to be fair. There's a neat bit of tidying, isn't there, at the end, where, as Colthurst asked, his ideas for improvement,

which is essentially getting masters and men to talk to one another and to build a relationship of trust the thing is i'm laughing but okay that's that's you're so right andy when you say i mean we are right and jennifer when you say we're right back in this we're this is exactly where we are mean, that whole thing about the strike reminds me so much of the miners' strike. And why didn't they have a ballot? If they'd had a ballot, it would have been legitimate, but wasn't. So they were breaking the law and the use of force to break strike. None of this stuff has gone away at all.

In fact, it just keeps winding itself up more and more. And, you know, the kind of the limits at the moment when you're thinking about the limits of the state, what should the state be looking after public utilities? You know, all through the book, the masters are saying, we don't want laws to regulate what we do. And yet not having laws to regulate what you do, you end up with a character like Bessie who's dying because of the fluff that's caused her to have consumption, you know, working in awful conditions. Such a great book. I love this book. I mean, another binary that I think Gaskell really breaks down, though, is it relates directly to Bessie. So we see that workers are destroyed quite literally by the work that they do, where she's breathed in this bad stuff. But I'm going to read a description from early in the novel, where she's just talking about the kind of vibe of the workers leaving the factories. And it presents a very different

picture, especially of women. So she's writing about the little, the part of Milton based on Manchester, where she and her mother and father live. The side of the town on which Crampton lay was especially a thoroughfare for the factory people. In the back streets around them, there were many mills out of which poured streams of men and women two or three times a day. Until Margaret had learned the times of their ingress and egress, she was very unfortunate in constantly falling in with them. They came rushing along with bold, fearless faces and loud laughs and jests, particularly aimed at all those who appeared to be above them in rank or station. The tones of their unrestrained voices and their carelessness of all common rules of street politeness frightened Margaret a little at first.

The girls, with their rough but not unfriendly freedom, would comment on her dress, even touch her shawl or gown, to ascertain the exact material. Nay, once or twice she was asked questions relative to some article which they particularly admired. There was such a simple reliance on her womanly sympathy with their love of dress and on her kindliness that she gladly replied to these inquiries as soon as she understood them and half smiled back at their remarks. remarks. She did not mind meeting any number of girls, loudspoken and boisterous though they might be. So this is a very different picture of female factory workers who are not expressing any sense of downtroddenness, but in fact, a kind of boldness. And I particularly love that because they're all in the cotton trade, they know their fabrics. They want to know what exactly she's wearing and what it's made of. It's a fantastic contrast. I mean, Bessie is a figure who might easily have appeared in Dickens. I mean, that's a kind of real, an articulate and poignant victim of larger forces.

But there is another current in this book that is much more complex of women who actually seem to be liberated by this work and very confident as they move through the world. that um not only is is gaskell doing this work of complicating how we think about masters in the book and and mill owners and all of that you know the kind of structures of power she's actually also complicating how we might think about working people and and there's joy in what in that section that jennifer just read, that there's a kind of ease and freedom that actually someone like Margaret might well envy, right? Who is constantly being told to go and tell someone something that someone else is too scared to tell them and all of that.

She's trapped between people who are incredibly restricted in how they speak and what they feel able to say. And then you get this presentation of these women who kind of shock her initially by being so freely spoken, right? And there's a glory and freedom in that that is utterly deliberate. You're right, Jennifer. It's completely part of the work of the book.

And I feel almost a kind of recognition, like she, she sees she is the one who is always doing everything, whether she wants to or not. I mean, she it's frequently remarked that she's just exhausted, like she doesn't have a moment. You know, everyone else is so, you know, helpless, and she's the only one who can really do anything. And so she sees these women who are so vibrant. And I think there is a kind of recognition there. And it presages, you know, her own, I think, comfort, actually, her own sense of the North really as home for her, in some sense. I also thought, John, can I ask John to pick up on this?

I also thought how interesting it was, and non-Dickensian, the way death is presented in this novel. So in a Dickens novel, you know, and we love Dickens on Batman. We do. We are very pro-Dickens, but we know that Dickens would, you know, milk a death for everything it was worth, right? That is his thing, his shtick, one of the things that made him so popular with the public, right?

What I loved in North and South is how death is always patrolling on the outskirts, but not even on the outskirts, intrudes at the most inconvenient moments into major characters' destinies and lives in a way that dickens would not be capable of doing this he he does not have that social realist approach to to not merely introducing death into a narrative but showing you the impacts of death on the individual characters who then have to

carry that forward through the rest of the novel it seems incredibly sophisticated she wanted to call it at one point she joked she'd call it death and variations um there is a there is a pile up which is there's a body pile up i mean there i think there are no spoilers there are five major deaths, and I'm blasting into them, I'm sorry, because I think it's really interesting what she does. She does, obviously, she does the slightly Dickensian, little Nelly thing with Bessie.

But the death of, I'm sorry, the death of her mother is foreshadowed, but it's very sudden, and the response to the death both her response and her father's felt felt incredibly real incredibly psychologically sort of traumatized then her father's death is is just it's totally out of the blue and unexpected like death often happens there's another i think really interesting death in the book which is the death of boucher and he is a suicide and he's carried on a board through the streets as they did so that somebody would claim him and then it gets even worse the wife claims him takes him upstairs and the kids say at one point you know, our dad, that man upstairs

don't look like our dad. You know, our dad never looked at us like that. And I mean, it's like terrifying kind of children having to see a sort of drowned body in their bedroom. So it's much more, you know, a long way from Dickens. The real surprise is when all those characters come back to life, like Night of the Living Dead. She's well ahead of her time. Now, is the presence of death in this novel a

social realist statement, or is it a dramatic statement? or is it a dramatic statement? I mean, the easy and true answer is that it's both, right? Of course. I don't know if we did a full body count of Mary Barton versus North and South. Presumably Mary Barton would win. But Gaskell uses death because death is what she sees around her on the streets of Manchester.

And she's doing the work of the novelist and the work of the journalist in those moments and I agree the portrayals of death are in they feel incredibly true and in lots of ways Bessie's death does sort of stand out amongst these as as perhaps not feeling quite or feeling slightly more of a dramatic death than a than a perhaps just a sort of emotionally true one but I think she also has to be that character if we have the happy free easy going what girls leaving the factory that Jennifer read. We also need Bessie who dies from inhaling cotton dust, right? It has to be there.

But isn't it true now? And I'm sadly, my knowledge of Gaskell's life is mostly derived from Wikipedia, but what I learned was that she was, that what actually catalyzed her writing was the death of her son willie um and she had only daughters i think who who lived um unless i'm wrong and that that loss was really huge for her i was thinking about that too that she describes the impetus to write her first novel being the the grief she felt at the loss of her son.

I think he was nine months old, a very, very young son. And it is interesting to think of her writing being in large part just a process of understanding grief and death. And it's in all of the novels. Her mum died when she was very young and her dad remarried and she didn't get on with her with her um stepmother and then her brother her

her other brother disappears at sea and is never heard of again so uh you know kind of death and disappearance and trauma is that sense of margaret having to to to go through yet wave after wave and always come back and be the strong one. You feel it's coming from somewhere real in Mrs. Gaskell. It's interesting, though, that really most of the people who die in this book, maybe with the exception of Bessie, are people who may partly have died because they couldn't figure out a way forward in the lives they were occupying. I mean, Margaret's mother begins to expire the moment she arrives in Milton. Her father

is expiring the moment the mother expires. Mr. is a very vivacious guy but you know he's already he's toward the end of his life and and you know it's not quite clear what comes next for him and it's interesting though you know we haven't talked about frederick um margaret's brother who it you know comes up kind of naturally in discussion of Elizabeth Gaskell's brother that Frederick has has been part of a mutiny. So he was with the Navy and therefore is, you know, in exile. And and his some of his fellow sailors, I think, were sentenced to death because they returned to England. But he does come back to say goodbye to their mother. And I had sort of expected Frederick to be kind

of a sad figure. You know, he's living in exile. He can't come back. Not at all. He's madly in love with young Dolores in Spain. He's converted to Catholicism. So again, we have all this kind of moving around ecclesiastically. Drinking sherry, loving his sherry. And he has an amazing little speech that I'm going to read that he says to Margaret, which I think is actually kind of important. He says, come, come, let us go upstairs and do something rather than waste time that may be so precious. Thinking has many a time made me sad, darling,

but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of get money, my son, honestly, if you can, but get money. My precept is do something, my sister, do good if you can, but at any rate, do something. Not excluding mischief, said Margaret, smiling faintly through her tears, by no means. What I do exclude is the remorse afterwards. So again, you know, it's this really... He's a rogue, man. He's a rogue, that guy. And it's just about moving, like keep moving. What you said, Nell, about her love of travel and her wish to move. I feel like that restlessness of spirit really pervades this book and the people who thrive in it are the ones who embrace that and

the people who stop moving die die yeah right I love it when she's going to go to Cadiz to visit him and she wants to take Dixon and Dixon is a great character in this novel. Dixon's just, you know, if you're going to have a caricature of a lady's maid who all she wants is to go back to the good old days and to have pretty dresses and, you know. But the thing where she's really freaked by the idea of going to Spain because she might go into a church and convert to Catholicism. Like, don't even, don't give me that temptation. It is an extremely rich social tapestry that she weaves.

The fecklessness of London parties. London parties are still like that. You know, you still think, oh God, I want to go back to the North where people talk about the labour theory of value and they talk about social change and they talk about, you know, technological change and big ideas, not what was he wearing and what did X say to Y?

One thing that strikes me in North and South is that peripheral characters are described with a lot of humor. And that little passage I read about Frederick is one example, but there are a lot of them. Dixon is a very kind of almost just a hilarious figure, almost before she says or does anything. And I'm just I'm curious now about your thoughts about the role humor plays in her novels and why it is limited in a way to the margins, rather than part of a genuinely comic vision of any kind. It's a question I've thought about so much. Why would this incredibly funny writer not make full use of that talent on the page?

And I don't have an answer. I have kind of speculations, I suppose, which come back again to maybe the corner she's in as a certain kind of female novelist at the time. And I mean, I think Elliot is not as funny a person, I think, as Gaspar intrinsically. But there are moments, you know, if you think about Middlemarch,

there are moments of humour in Middlemarch. But they are similarly confined to sort of set pieces or little sketches and the the main characters are are so serious and Margaret Hale is an incredibly serious person um you know almost pathologically serious sometimes and I my only thought must be that it if one is fighting so hard to be taken seriously yeah that it is just a risk to be funny and it's such a loss it's such a loss if you think of the way that humor works in a dickens novel where it's just enmeshed it's it's part of the fabric in in so many of them and yet we also are comfortable understanding dickens as a serious novelist and a writer who tackled social issues and all of these other facets and strings.

We can do that with male writers. It's still, I think it's still a problem. I think still we don't know how to deal with funny female writers who are also doing serious work. But that's my theory on it. It's brilliant. Could I ask to just pick that up actually now? Why, let's accentuate the positive. What is it about Elizabeth Gaskell's work

that has caused her to be reappraised in this era? Because she was kind of marginalised, wasn't she? She was. In the 20th century. Why are we finding her again now? I have two theories. One is a kind of more general thought that she really loves people and she really understands people and she's very, very good on that.

And that's just good writing. And we hope that eventually the good writing rises to the top. And the other is, it goes right back to what we were talking about at the beginning, which is these questions that she's tackling, you know, these social questions and these political questions remain the questions that we we obsess over and that we haven't yet got answers for and she's on it she's thinking through industrial action she's thinking through these labor relations and we're still there and and we we can't afford to not listen at the moment i think i think that's, how brilliant. Yes, we can't afford not to

listen. How true that is. That's exactly what I felt when I was reading this novel. One thing that she's doing that's interesting is that there is no institution in the novel that isn't questioned very strongly. There's no, we can't look to institutions for stability, is one of the clear messages of this book. I mean, the church, no way. She was a Unitarian. Margaret's father can no longer even be a pastor for the Church of England. Frederick converts to Catholicism. So that's all over the place. The state, Frederick is part of a mutiny and he's a sympathetic figure. We are led to feel that actually he was right to take action against his commander. Well, that's really not cool in military life. You know, unions are institutions that are also very flawed. And

Margaret overtly blames Higgins for Boucher's death. She says, you made him mad. You made him go crazy by forcing him to join the union. But the market on its own is not an acceptable regulator of lives either. So I feel that it's actually, in a way, it's a very individualistic vision, which is we ourselves have to figure out what we believe in and how to live by it. And we best talk to as many people as possible so that we can do that responsibly. And that's a really modern view. Absolutely right. Kind of liberal humanism in action, right?

So listen, we have to wind up in a minute, but John is keen that we discuss the ending of the novel. So listeners, if you haven't read North and South in the last 150 to 60 years, what's wrong with you? We're going to talk about the ending, so you might want to fast forward past this bit for the next five minutes.

John, I'm going to ask each of you in turn a straightforward question about the ending of North and South. John Mitchinson, do you buy the ending of North and South? No, sir, I do not. I mean, I wish I did. I want to.

And I can see why it kind of is the union of opposite, you know, they're the two, obviously, they're the two best characters in the book, and it's're the two best characters in the book and it's great for them to get together. But I feel a little bit like the rewritten ending of Great Expectations about this. I love the original ending where they pass each other

on the street and go their separate ways. I just, I think if this wasn't a book, it wouldn't have happened. Right, Nell Stephens, do you buy the ending of the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, your favourite novelist? Do you buy the ending of her novel, North and South? I do not buy the ending of her novel, North and South. Smack!

I'm completely with John on this. I understand why it's there, and all of the ideas she's grappling with lead her there um I think it's ideologically flawed just personally from my political point of view but also I think it is dramatically weaker than it could have been and actually if you think about that section I just read of Margaret being proposed to the first time. This is not a character who's moved that far on that particular spectrum by the end of the novel. She's actually deeply disturbed by sexuality

and that element of humanity, and we haven't seen her make that progress. I don't buy it at all. All right, OK. I'm withholding my views for a second because I'm turning to Jennifer Egan. Jennifer Egan, do you buy the ending of the novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell?

100%. Yes! I'm with you! Go on. It's the only possible ending. And the fact... There's so many ways I can justify this. First of all, it is the perfect bookend toinstitutional novel back into the realm of a book that must be completed. And she does it in the only satisfying way that she could. And I love

that it's actually very flippant. I mean, the final scene, the dialogue that closes it is just funny and almost throwaway. I love that she does that. I think you can give her credit for even a kind of meta approach here where she says, look, it is a book. Okay. And books have to be finished. And of course they're going to end up together. What the hell else are they going to do? And so I just think it's perfect. I, Jennifer, thank goodness for you. I throw my weight behind that reading of the ending of the novel. Of course, it's a novel. It doesn't, it's fine.

What's wrong with John and Nell? I don't know. But anyway, they like, you know, they're sour. Their life has disappointed them and they don't want to see people happy. I want to see people happy at the end of this novel. I love the ending. You know, do I buy the ending of Billy Wilder's The Apartment? No.

But do I buy the ending of Billy Wilder's The Apartment? Absolutely, because I want to. And that's how I feel about North and South. I think the question you asked was, do you buy it? And I don't buy it. I'm not convinced by it do I completely understand Jennifer and and your point about it needing to be there yes I think it in terms of exactly what Jennifer said about meeting the the questions asked by the very beginning yes in terms of it being a kind of conclusion to some of the ideological questions

that she's asking in the book, yes. I think she's actually, she's done too brilliantly at portraying complexity earlier on for it to be something I would buy, that she's got a character in Margaret who is just so, so complex and so brilliant and so plausible and so viable that it makes the ending land less securely. The reason that we are so unprepared for her

capitulation is because we've been utterly persuaded by her revulsion by sexuality. But that gets at a much bigger problem where I think we have to have another entire conversation about female sexuality in the Victorian novel. I mean, virginity was a totally unstable property. And you were not, even in a novel that you could call very progressive with regard to female power, you know, in the end, she has the power. He essentially, you know, accepts her proposal, as it were. She's the one with all the money. But for all that, in no way does this novel question the sanctity of virginity, the necessity that it be maintained. All of those rules and strictures are absolutely there.

And so it makes it almost inconceivable that she could ever have a good sexual relationship with anyone. But I think that is because of the constraints of the literary constraints of the era, obviously not the human constraints, because writers were doing all kinds of things, but these rules could not be broken narratively. And it sets up a very difficult proposition for any sort of believable union. I don't mean to keep us here all night and I promise I will drop it. I take the point. I think we have to remember that one, we're talking about the author of Ruth, right? And Ruth is a novel that has a very different relationship to virginity and female sociality but also the tension that you're describing is absolutely the tension that I see and that I love

and what makes me so interested in Gaskell herself that this woman who is really quite devoted to her husband who writes to George Eliot saying I wish I could write Mrs. to you, which is incredibly rude, I think, but who's partying with George Don in Paris, right? And writing Ruth. And she is all of this and she's complicated and that's in the book and that's the strength of the book and potentially some of it's weakness.

So listen, we have to wind up. So basically, in answer to the question, do you buy the ending i andy miller by the ending jennifer egan buys the ending john mitchinson the curmudgeon john mitchinson does not buy the ending nell stevens has hedged her bed so she she both buys it and doesn't buy it but that is what we expect that's fine we do buy and don't buy it i'm just saying i'm not i'm saving you shifting sands i tell you what you buy it. I'm just saying. Oh, he's jumping. No, I'm not. He's moving. He's shifting sands. I tell you what, you buy it when you watch the TV adaptation

because Richard Armitage and the wonderful actress who plays Margaret are so good. Daniela Dembias. You can convey a lot of sexual tension when you're performing something. It's harder to see it on the page. Why don't we hear our Victorian sound effect again? Because I found that deeply funny. Can we hear that again?

Hey, watch the self, lad. What's young fella doing? He's got a plane. Watch him. And now, with that, we must say well to Milton's cobbled streets and offer a huge thank you to Jennifer and Nell for bringing the Gaskell universe to vivid life, to Tess and Nicky for scoring our four separate voices into a euphonious whole,

and to Unbound for the dishes of ripe fruit. Pez. You can download all 169 previous episodes. 169 of this? Incredible. Plus, follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook

and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early. And for considerably less than the price of an Indian shawl, lot listeners get two extra lot listings a month, our very own factory canteen where we three serve one another with hearty helpings of opinion about the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.

hearty helpings of opinion about the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's new patrons include Maureen Rice. Thank you, Maureen. Tess Wheeler. Thank you, Tess. Suzanne Carbonneau. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you all for your generosity and to all our patrons. Huge thanks for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy. Before we go, so I'm going to turn to both our guests and say,

first of all, Nell Stephens, is there anything you would like to add about North and South or Elizabeth Mrs Gaskell that we have not yet covered? Read the ghost stories, that's what I would add. Are they available in a volume of ghost stories or do we have to hunt around for them? There's a volume, I think it's called Gothic Tales, that's very helpfully packaged for your appreciation.

Thank you. That's an excellent tip. Halloween is approaching. Thank you very much. Jennifer, is there anything you would like to add about this novel or this author that we haven't talked about? I think I'm going to follow Nell's lead and say Reed Cranford is so lovely and it is hilarious. So that is a case where and it's a loving portrait of the South.

So, again, to break down the binaries, we have this really sweet and funny and and moving portrait in Cranford. I loved it. All right, that's marvellous. Johnny, is there anything you want to add at this point? I was going to say, watch that BBC 2004 adaptation because it puts the sex into North and South. All I'm going to add is I went into the book interested in the South and I came out enjoying the north

so so thank you Elizabeth Gaskell thank you Nell Stephens thank you Jennifer Egan John Mitchinson what a brilliant absolute pleasure this conversation has been wonderful wonderful hour or however long we did fantastic bye-bye right thank you guys If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted as well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call lock listed, which is Andy, me and Nikki talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.