Scheherezade in the marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian novel

Abstract

In this book Schor places the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell in the context both of Victorian society and Victorian fiction. She argues that Gaskell--long viewed as a private, gentle woman who wrote only from a sense of outrage at Industrial England--was in fact intensely interested in publication and in assuming a public voice. Schor also examines how Gaskell's efforts to write about those denied a voice within Victorian society led her to an awareness of her own silencing, and also the limitations of the culture's prevalent literary forms. Schor focuses first on Gaskell's early writing efforts and the difficulty encountered by a woman novelist trying to find a voice; then, on Gaskell's relation to the literary marketplace, and particularly her problematic relationship with Dickens; and finally, on the structure of Gaskell's final novels and the possibilities offered therein for alternative fictions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 123 citations exist upstream.