Getting ‘[Be]Wildered On The Fells’

Elizabeth Gaskell was an ardent admirer of the English Lake District, and its uplandscapes appear as a recurring environment in a range of her short fiction. In ‘The Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (1853), the narrator recounts that ‘there [are] no lack of tales’ about individuals getting lost on ‘the wild and desolate Fells’; this extends to several of her short stories set in the region, including ‘Martha Preston’ (1850), ‘The Old Nurse’s Story' (1852), ‘Half a Life-Time Ago’ (1855), and ‘The Half-Brothers’ (1859). Through the palimpsestic variations in these narratives, Gaskell adapts Dorothy Wordsworth's and Harriet Martineau's tragic accounts of a couple who were ‘bewildered’ when crossing the snow-covered fells. In tracing these set pieces closely, this chapter examines the author's depictions of individuals navigating this wild environment, a setting that can be rendered strange by altitude and climate to the uninitiated and experienced Laker. Through the lens of ecocriticism and landscape studies, this essay meditates on Gaskell's familiarity with these bewildering environments and localised cultures and situates her work in a tradition of Lakeland literature. In tracing Gaskell's attunement to these environs, this chapter makes a claim for the presence of an environmental sensibility within and beyond the parameters of her fiction.