78–129.

25 Gaskell made several trips to Heidelberg, the first one in 1841; see, for example, Letters, no. 15, pp. 40–45 and no. 485, pp. 647–50.

26 ‘The law against witchcraft passed by Parliament in the year of Queen Elizabeth’s accession (1559 [actually 1558]) remained on our statute-book till 1736’ (A. W. Ward, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, 8 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1906), vol. 7, p. xx).

27 Actually, there are many ways in which ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ can be seen as a ‘borrowing’ of Wuthering Heights, most notably in the scenes where the ghost of the little girl stands beseechingly at the window, trying to incite the real, live Rosamund out into the cold and snowy fells. Moreover, in an uncanny moment of her own literary doubling, Gaskell recounts a story in The Life of Charlotte Brontë that ‘made a deep impression on Charlotte’s mind’, but which eerily repeats the plot of her own short story, written five years before the biography. It tells of a Haworth woman who had been seduced by her brother-in-law, and became pregnant. Her outraged father locked her up in her room while ‘her elder sisters flouted at and scorned her’ (pp. 44, 45). Haworth legend reveals that the ghosts of the mother and her daughter continue to haunt the area.

28 It is worth noting in this context Uglow’s point that ‘Lois the Witch’ invites the reader to criticize and reject the ‘masculine’ misreadings of the Old Testament by showing us the cruelties and prejudices inherent in the blind distortion of Scriptural readings (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, p. 479).

29 The families themselves can be seen as doubled constructs in this story; Owen’s domestic arrangement with Nest is the affectionate, mother-centred home which is the mirror opposite of the malicious, manipulative family created by Owen’s cruel stepmother, confusingly called ‘Mrs Owen’.

30 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vol. 8, p. 4.

31 Gaskell herself was raised by a ‘surrogate’ mother, her aunt Hannah Lumb, and surrounded by a community of women not too unlike those described in Cranford (1853). See Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, p. 31, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

FURTHER READING

Although very little has been written on the stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, there are some excellent more general studies of her life and works, the best of which is Jenny Uglow's exemplary biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993). Uglow examines all of the pieces in this collection in some degree, and provides a portrait of the writer in lively, well-researched detail. Patsy Stoneman's Elizabeth Gaskell (Sussex: Harvester, 1987) also discusses the stories, and Enid L. Duthie's The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Macmillan, 1980) devotes a chapter to themes of ‘Mystery and Macabre’. Angus Easson's Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) provides biographical information as well as discussions of each story, and there is a chapter on the short fiction in Arthur Pollard, Mrs Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Although unfortunately out of print, the Knutsford edition, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, ed.