453), such a vision does not go unquestioned. Sylvia's last words to Hester are ‘“do yo' think… as God will let me to him where he is?”’ (p. 454), and the assurances of death-bed pieties are not wholly definitive. Nevertheless, unification, albeit last-minute, has been achieved, and the widened temporal and topographical dimensions with which the novel concludes dissipate the earlier suffering and conflict. Sylvia's daughter, Bella, marries and emigrates to the New World; the events of the tale become history, gaining meaning by their inscription as ‘story' and distanced by the shaping forces of the articulating imagination.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1 Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1903, vol. 1, p. 357.

2 J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds.), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester University Press, 1966, p. 586.

3 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 717.

4 Reprinted in A. W. Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, 8 vols., Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1906, vol. 1, p. lxxiii.

5 F. K. Robinson's Whitby: Its Abbey and the Principal Parts of the Neighbourhood, S. Reed, Whitby, 1860, is a valuable source of information about the town and its environs. Its date of publication makes it very likely that Gaskell consulted it during her researches for the novel.

6 Robinson, Whitby, p. 131.

7 Sylvia's Lovers, Chapter VI, p. 64.

8 Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, new and revised edition, 1913, p. 263.

9 Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, vol. VI, p. xiv.

10 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 718.

11 For details of the likely sources of these researches, see Appendix 1.

12 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 595.

13 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 596.

14 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 606.