Death, Dying, and the rites of Mourning in Elizabeth Gaskell's Fiction

This chapter speaks to the widely acknowledged prevalence of death across Gaskell's novels. Drawing on critical and cultural-historical scholarship in Gaskell and Victorian studies, as well as the affective influence of Gaskell's personal biography of loss, it considers how representations of death and dying shape Gaskell's fiction, ethically, aesthetically, and theologically, as well as the degree to which they measure her maturation as a realist novelist. The chapter also examines the degree to which Gaskell's oeuvre is inflected by, and participates in, Victorian cultural constructions of death, and begins the overdue task of positioning Gaskell's work within the contemporary field of death studies.