‘It is not long to bide’: The Shorter Fiction and the Meaning of Lives

Abstract

Though each story has its own peculiar character, three features serve particularly to distinguish Mrs Gaskell’s shorter fiction — its concern with the past, the interest in family and blood ties, and its exploration of the meaning of an individual’s life. Such matters are not confined of course to her shorter fiction, but a special focus is given to them by the more compact form. The past is met with in the novels as a precondition for present circumstances, or as the actual setting for some works — a period within living memory but romantically distant by at least a generation. In her shorter fiction, however, the sense of the past has a peculiar oppresiveness. This is in part because it is felt in generations and families, and in part because of the secrets the past contains. Many of these stories detail family relations — marriages, births and deaths — for more than one generation before narrating the central action of the tale. ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, for example, describes the rise of Mr Wilkins senior as an attorney, passes on to the career of his son, before finally passing to that son’s daughter Ellinor, whose guilty secret forms the main point of the story.