What is it like to be a writer-in-residence at the home of the Cranford novelist, when you haven’t read any of her work?
Three women have been chosen for the role at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester precisely because they “didn’t know her”.
In the quest to appeal to a new audience, the museum’s director Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd reflects: “We need to see [her work] through other people’s eyes.”
The Victorian author’s stories weave in love, bereavement and the fight for social justice, at a time when the country had a powerful empire and faced huge economic shifts nationally.
But she is not as widely known as fellow 19th Century writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
Guruleen Kahlo, who is in the final year of her English degree, is one of the museum’s new writers-in-residence and says it’s a “massive shame she has been left off the list”.
Gaskell was inspired by her husband to take up writing after the death of their baby son and Guruleen says she is “curious” to find out more about the novelist, whom she describes as a feminist, adding: “Given Manchester’s history with the suffragettes, she probably laid some of the groundwork.”
“She had the independence to take her children to Europe by herself, she’s clearly very different to a lot of her contemporaries and I think that’s fascinating.”
The museum tends to attract foreign visitors and literature graduate Princess Arinola Adegbite, who will also be a writer-in-residence, says she hopes their work will “get more English people to be interested again in this aspect of the culture – it’s for any background”.
She says she is “intrigued” to explore “how Elizabeth’s domestic space both confined and liberated her creative voice”.
After reading “mainly things written by men” for her music and drama degree, scriptwriter Georgia Affonso, 29, hopes her new role as writer-in-residence will be “a good opportunity to get to grips with why maybe I am a bit put off” by classical literature.
“I have already started finding points of connection that I’m excited about,” she says.
“Social inequality is something I encounter throughout my work, and writing is one of the ways I try to figure out how we fix it.”
On Princess’s first visit to the Regency-style villa – where the Gaskell family moved in 1850 – the Salford-based writer says she experienced “initial confusion”, thinking “why would someone this high class care [about social justice]?”
She says she has since learnt the author “was a kind person” who “didn’t only explore things that affected her, she explored issues that never were directly relevant, like women having kids outside of marriage and being tricked into those type of relationships by wealthier men”.
The 24-year-old is also interested in Gaskell’s analysis of the Victorian era’s “power dynamics” of social classes and between “people in the colonized world – like in Africa and India – and people in the Western white world” and the “relationship between men and women of any race”.
Princess describes Gaskell, who was part of the Unitarian Christian community, as “very enlightened”.
“I consider myself as a spiritual liberal Christian and I liked how accepting her idea of God was… I also think that connects to creativity,” she says.
“I want to embody in the writing that nuance that women can be homemakers but also creatives.”
She hopes to create poetry inspired by Gaskell’s crosshatching style of writing, which was used to save paper and money.
Sally, who oversees the historical house, says she find it “emotional” to hear the trio’s experiences and ideas, adding she “completely understands and respects there are barriers”.
“On the other side I know we have a great offer and it is interesting and relevant,” she says.
“But it’s about how do we tell that story as a small struggling independent museum?”
“There are tonnes of barriers and she’s also a woman – she isn’t deemed interesting because she was married, she had children, there isn’t a lot of controversy about her either,” she says.
Sally describes Gaskell as “complex”, and adds: “She was a working mother… and she wrote real characters, who are three-dimensional with dialects.
“They are not completely good, not completely bad.
“She isn’t on the curriculum in schools but if you are from Manchester, I can’t think of a more accessible way to learn about the Industrial Revolution than through her novels.”
Princess, who was born in Jamaica to Nigerian parents, says she believes that “English heritage is everyone’s heritage, even people from colonised countries, because we inspired English culture from cotton, diamonds, the clothing”.
She adds: “Everyone has a connection to English heritage even if you felt marginalised from it – so come and see it and be inspired by it.”
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)
- Born in London in 1810, Elizabeth Gaskell moved to Cheshire after her mother’s death and spent her childhood with her aunt in Knutsford – the inspiration for Cranford
- Following the death of her baby son, she was encouraged to take up writing by her husband Reverend William Gaskell
- They lived in Manchester, then a centre of industry and radical politics
- She wrote eight novels alongside shorter works and a posthumous biography of fellow writer and her friend Charlotte Bronte
- Her works include Cranford, North and South, Mary Barton and Wives and Daughters
- Gaskell died in 1865, just before concluding Wives and Daughters, and is buried in Knutsford
