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Writing from the Heart of the House

CAROLYN Lambert offers a fascinating insight into Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing life by giving the reader not a plan for one of her novels, but a plan of her house. Both Gaskell and her husband worked from home, but whereas at Plymouth Grove he had a private study right by the front door, enabling ‘easy access for students and parishioners, but allowing an equally swift departure to his commitments in the outside world’ (33), she wrote in the dining room, ‘in the heart of the house’ (34). This room, as the floor plan shows, opened out onto the hall, the drawing room, the servants’ quarters and the conservatory; it was a place for doing household accounts as well as for writing novels, for entertaining as well as for studying. Gaskell’s juggling of multiple roles and identities, as a novelist as well as the mistress of a busy house, as a mother and manager as well as an idealist and a reformer—what she called in an agonized letter ‘my mes ... these warring members’ (13)—is perfectly captured in this spatial rendering of her domestic life. Where William could legitimately withdraw to his study, Gaskell’s writing emerged from the centre of domestic life and, as Lambert shows, her writing reflects this position in multiple and complex ways. Lambert argues that both Gaskell’s life and work break down any stable notion a modern reader might have of the ‘separate spheres’ men and women occupied in the nineteenth century. Not only did William Gaskell work from home but, as Lambert points out, there is more than one way to read that floor plan. While the dining room is in an obvious sense a far more public room in which to work than a private study, Gaskell may have closed all the doors when she was working, and since William’s study was opposite the children’s day nursery, it is not safe to assume that he was entirely cut off from domestic interruptions. One of Lambert’s most engaging qualities as a writer is her willingness to consider contradictory sides of Gaskell’s writing and experience, and to draw on a wide variety of sources, from William’s sermons to Gaskell’s Carolyn Lambert, The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction, Victorian Secrets, 2013, £14.00 paperback 978 1 9064 6947 4. R E V I E W .