Correspondence, Sociability, and Elizabeth Gaskell

As Alison Chapman recognises, in her piece ‘Afterword: Victorian Salons and Forms of Poetic Sociability’ for Victorian Poetry (vol. 60, no. 2, June 22, pp. 263–71), many scholars of Victorian literature have recently turned their attention to social networks, as they begin the work of ‘recovering the wide range of Victorian literary sociability and its importance for literary history and genre’ (p. 266). This chapter examines the correspondence of Elizabeth Gaskell, a prolific letter writer, in order to plot her position in an informal network of writers and artists in the 1850s that included John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Eliot Norton, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Recognising Gaskell's double displacement from Britain's literary and artistic circles, on account of her gender and her physical location in Manchester, this chapter argues that letter writing allowed Gaskell to access geographically distant socio-literary networks. Providing Gaskell with an important opportunity to interact with poets, critics, and artists during her most productive fiction-writing years, correspondence helped affirm her position as a leading novelist and social critic through personally and professionally rewarding relationships. Her correspondence with Barrett Browning, for example, combines candid discussion of the women's shared experience of motherhood alongside praise of Gaskell's then-controversial novel, Ruth . Her communication with the most famous female poet of the day thus offered Gaskell with an important vehicle through which to consolidate her identity as a women writer, as she learned to negotiate her many public and private selves. While Gaskell's correspondence with Barrett Browning speaks to her position in a network of female authors, her exchange of letters with prominent male literary and artistic figures challenges the residual critical tendency to see women writers only in relation to other women. The letters she exchanged with Norton, Ruskin, Rossetti, and others demonstrate that Gaskell was as productively embedded in a network of male writers and artists, a position that she leveraged to intervene in public affairs.