May 2024 – Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester
Having done the Bronte Parsonage last month, I thought that this month I’d talk about another lovely literary museum I visited last year when I was in Manchester.
It’s interesting how Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) has risen in the ranks of great writers since the dim, distant past when I studied literature at the University of Queensland. She didn’t get a mention back then, although her biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte was well known. Now she’s on the syllabus of any institution that studies Victorian writing.
Part of this is the surge of interest in women writers from the past – my literature degree mostly covered dead, white males. Part of this is that the BBC had pretty much exhausted Austen and the Brontes and went looking for other great books with romantic stories to adapt. So there were two series of the delightful Cranford (2007), an excellent adaptation of her last book, Wives and Daughters (1999), and my personal favorite, the glorious North and South (2004), featuring Richard Armitage as the ultimate romantic hero.
When I realized that I was going to be visiting Manchester in September 2023, I was delighted to discover that Mrs. Gaskell’s house has been restored to reflect how it looked during her lifetime and it now contains a museum and study center for her work.
The house also contains a lot of incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgeable guides who made the whole visit an absolute pleasure. They clearly love Mrs. Gaskell and are fascinated by Manchester in the Victorian era. If you visit the house, don’t be shy about talking to them. They clearly adore the chance to share their passion for Mrs. G with people who come to the museum.
I must admit when I visited, I’d never actually read a book by Mrs. Gaskell. I’ve since read Cranford and have plans to read North and South. At the time of my visit, my knowledge of the writer was fairly limited. So it was exciting to discover a woman who was in many ways ahead of her time. A reformer and an independent thinker and even better, a Victorian woman who had a very happy marriage with her husband, the famous Unitarian minister William Gaskell. It was lovely to encounter a real 19th-century match clearly based on enduring love and respect.
Mrs. Gaskell lived in Manchester at a time of enormous social change and her books detail this. But one of the things that surprised me when I read Cranford was how funny she was. She had a sharp eye for pretension and self-delusion, but her humor is affectionate rather than biting. Very much my style. When you look at that lovely portrait of her from 1832, painted when she was 22, you just know she was a woman with spirit!
Even more exciting for a girl like me who was a lifelong Bronte fan, Charlotte Bronte was a good friend of Elizabeth’s, and she visited the house a couple of times. I got to stand just where CB did, which was exciting. The story goes that the very shy Charlotte hid behind the curtains in the drawing room when an unexpected visitor turned up to meet her.
You can find out more about this fascinating place here: https://elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk/ There you’ll find some lovey photos of the interiors (we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside). Below you can see some photos of the exterior of this very elegant building.
If you’re interested in women writers, Victorian life, or literature, I’d highly recommend visiting the Elizabeth Gaskell House at 84 Plymouth Grove in Manchester. It’s a warm, welcoming place and Mrs. Gaskell deserves to be better known, both as a writer and a woman. There’s an interesting Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gaskell
