Most significant, perhaps, are the events that are narrated by Lucy herself, including her description of her double whom we almost immediately witness as the object of the male narrator’s gaze. When Lucy tells her story, however, she describes seeing her dual images reflected in the mirror, highlighting the difference between Lucy outside the mirror and the demonic ‘Lucy’ reflected back at her:

In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged… I suddenly swooned away… even while I lay [in my sickbed] my double was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always about some mischievous or detestable work.

Thus the fragmented narrative, its various components narrated by different voices, suggests perhaps the loss of authority of the text, just as the above quotation demonstrates Lucy’s loss of authority over her own consciousness. The unstable narrative voice is thus repeated in the instability of the speaking subject at the heart of the text, and here ‘The Poor Clare’ resembles ‘The Grey Woman’, another story of a tale-within-a-tale, where a woman, Anna Scherer, also looks in the mirror, only to be confronted with her sinister, eerily multiple reflections: ‘I caught my own face and figure reflected in all the mirrors, which showed only a mysterious background… I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up.’

Thus Gaskell here represents the power of consciousness which cannot be controlled, with its multiplicity of reflected images which seem to deny a single source of origin, just as she represents the uncontrollable power of the Word, manifested in the woman’s curse which doubles back on itself. ‘The Poor Clare’ is in this way associated with ‘Lois the Witch’, where language, curse and story-telling rebound back on the otherwise powerless female who curses others in a doomed attempt to stake some sort of authority. Just as in ‘The Poor Clare’ the very intensity of Bridget’s love led her to curse her own granddaughter through the male medium of Squire Gisborne, so too does the mother in ‘Lois the Witch’ unintentionally curse her own daughter when she cries, ‘Oh, Lois, would that thou wert dying with me!’ Like Lucy, Lois is cursed by her beauty and female attractiveness; her accusation as witch is in part motivated by Faith Hickson’s jealousy that Mr Nolan prefers her rival, as well as by Manasseh’s sexual desire which is distorted by his Calvinist fanaticism into a kind of manic persecution. Thus the Barford witch who cursed Lois as a revenge on Lois’s father is complicitous with the witch-hunters of Salem in damning Lois to death, as does Lois’s own mother with her dying wish. Yet Lois’s last word is the single cry of ‘Mother!’, rather than a cry for her father, suggesting perhaps the same kind of indissoluble bond that so enthralls and torments Bridget Fitzgerald and her lost daughter Mary.

So, as in ‘The Poor Clare’, ‘Lois the Witch’ demonstrates how female language can endanger the very people it seeks to protect, but it can also be the final resource of the powerless over the powerful, and we see this most clearly in Nattee, the Native American woman who serves in the house of the Hicksons. Like Lois, who frightens the Hickson girls with her stories of Hallowe’en and forms of divination and fortune-telling, Nattee tells ‘wild stories… of the wizards of her race’, and ‘the poor old creature… took a strange, unconscious pleasure in her power over her hearers – young girls of the oppressing race, which had brought her down into a state little differing from slavery’. Just as the inflexible fathers of Salem Puritanism tell their damaging stories about race, gender and sin, so does Nattee counter them with her own stories which privilege the power of the Native American ‘wizards’ over the authority and self-righteous justification of the New England patriarchs. However, Nattee’s – and Lois’s – stories of witchcraft and arcane powers which so frighten their hearers are ultimately, like the witch’s curse, turned against them. Both Nattee and Lois are hanged as witches, victimized by their own stories which were told as a means of empowering the self, but became merely another example of the ‘evidence’ collected by the fathers of the persecution to accuse and condemn them as demonic manifestations of the Other.

The stories and novellas collected here suggest the subtlety and variety of Gaskell’s own forms of empowerment, both as a means of expressing problems of domesticity otherwise repressed in her novels, and as a means, perhaps, of speaking for all of the silenced women represented within these tales. Her stories could thus be seen to explore the Gothic underside of female identity, domestic relations and the authority of the spoken and written word.

NOTES

1 The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997), no. 48, p. 81. All subsequent references to Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters will be to this edition as Letters. For the story in which Gaskell claims to have seen a ghost, see Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of my Life, 6 vols. (London: George Allen, 1896), vol. 2, pp. 225–7.

2 Jenny Uglow suggests that ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ deals with similar issues of unmarried mothers and illegitimate babies that Ruth (1853) does, but the Gothic scenario of the short story allows Gaskell to treat such potentially explosive material with greater force and freedom than she does in the more cautious and conservative novel (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 307). See also Ruth, ed. Angus Easson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997). Uglow makes a similar point about Gaskell’s Gothic stories expressing the surreal underside of her more realist novels in her ‘Introduction’ to Elizabeth Gaskell, Curious, if True (London: Virago, 1995), p.