In the same letter Gaskell asserts that ‘If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is no doubt of that’ (p. 107). She seems to be suggesting, then, that the ‘cultivation’ of art for the sake of the artist, rather than for the sake of others, is not only inappropriate, but ‘unholy’. See also Letter no. 515, written to an unknown correspondent, dated 25 September [? 1862] where, in the midst of a bracing discussion of laundering techniques, Gaskell advises the would-be woman writer that ‘one should weigh well whether this pleasure [of writing] may not be obtained by the sacrifice of some duty’ (p. 694). Finally, it is also worth considering Gaskell’s summing-up of Charlotte Brontë’s priorities when she writes, in reference to Brontë’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls, ‘we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife’ (The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 416).

8 Uglow, ‘Introduction’, Curious, if True, p. ix.

9 Letter to Eliza Fox, [? April 1850], in Letters, no. 69, p. 108.

10 See, e.g., John Geoffrey Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell’s Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works (Sussex: Linden Press, 1970), p. 119.

11 For Gaskell’s love of gossip, see Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, pp. 48, 255, and 628 n. 4. Further evidence of Gaskell’s mixing of fact and fiction can be found in a letter to George Smith, 27 December [1859], in which she refers to her story ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’, later renamed ‘The Crooked Branch’, as all true, as she heard it herself from Justice Erle and Tom Taylor in 1849 (Letters, no. 452, p. 596).

12 William Maskell, Odds and Ends (London: James Toovey, 1872), p. 77. See also John Collinson, The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset, Collected from Authentick [sic] Records, 3 vols. (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1791), vol. 3, pp. 460–61; Collinson relates virtually the same story as Maskell, and Collinson’s words are then quoted in John E. Farbrother, Shepton Mallet: Notes on Its History, Ancient, Descriptive, and Natural (Shepton Mallet: Albert Byrt, 1859), p. 145. See also Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell’s Observation and Invention, pp. 119–20, for a discussion of the discrepancies between Maskell’s and Gaskell’s versions.

13 See Samuel Butler, The Life and Letters of Samuel Butler, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1896), vol.