So it’s finally arrived! The day that every author waits for with an almost equal mixture of anticipation and anxiety! It’s very much like bringing a child into the world. Hopes and fears, feeling protective and yet wanting it to go out there, develop a life of its own and travel!
It’s almost nine years since I started writing this book, which makes it a particularly long labour! Part of the reason for that is the number of questions I had to ask along the way. Questions about Pasley, but also about Elizabeth. We know a lot about Elizabeth Gaskell from biographies, her letters, the recollections of people who knew her, a journal, and of course, all the books she wrote. The Elizabeth Gaskell House in Manchester is a wonderful resource and I visited it several times as well as listening to some of their excellent online talks. If you’re in the area it’s well worth a visit.
Weirdly, in some ways this wealth of information made it harder to write about Elizabeth, since so many people are so knowledgeable about her. I was worried about getting something wrong!
However, despite all the information about her I couldn’t find the answers to all my questions. For instance:
- What did Elizabeth think about Pasley?
- What was their relationship like?
- What effect did their meetings have on her?
- Was she ever tempted to take Pasley in herself?
- Was it a difficult decision to send her away?
- Did she consider other options?
- Did she ever discuss Pasley with her husband, William?
- Why was it so important to her to write Ruth when she says in her letters that she found it so difficult?
- What did she learn about herself in the process?
Well, fiction begins where research ends as the late great Hilary Mantel once said, and at this point I had to let my imagination take over, using the scaffolding of what is already known about Elizabeth to create a more intimate picture of her thoughts and feelings, and especially her relationship with Pasley.
I also wanted to explore the process of her becoming a writer – not just a ‘lady authoress’ who had written a novel that became famous, but someone with a real vocation to write. And even though Ruth is not Elizabeth’s most famous novel, I came to see it an important milestone in this process. It isn’t as popular today as Mary Barton, Cranford, or North and South, but it is the novel she committed herself to complete despite many difficulties. At the same time as writing Ruth she was publishing instalments of Cranford, which were wildly popular. However she chose not to continue with this lighter vein of fiction and concentrated instead on social issues that she knew would be controversial. And in fact Ruth was banned by certain libraries and bookshops and burned by two members of her husband’s congregation!
But why was it considered so controversial? I will look at that in my next post.
