Scheherezade in the marketplace

As the wife of a Unitarian minister who moved to Manchester, England at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Elizabeth Gaskell has traditionally been considered a practitioner of a kind of transparent realism, a naive reporter, an untrained sympathizer who wrote out of a sense of outrage at what she saw. Instead, Hilary Schor argues that Gaskell was in fact intensely interested in publication and in assuming a public voice. Scheherezade in the Marketplace is a study of Elizabeth Gaskell's encounters with--and subsequent experiments with--the "forms" of Victorian culture, both in society and literature. Looking at Gaskell's early writing efforts and the difficulty she encountered trying to find a voice, Schor focuses on the struggle of women writers with the literary plots they have inherited. Specifically, she explores how Gaskell used what seems to be the most conventional plot her culture offered, the heroine's courtship plot, to revise cultural expectations, and to open up the novel to new ideas and new forms. Examining the structure of Gaskell's final novels, Schor illustrates the possibilities offered therein for alternative fictions. By following the evolution of the heroine's plot throughout Gaskell's career, and tracing her development as a novelist, this study places Gaskell's fiction back in the marketplace of Victorian literature. Bringing to light her connections with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, her response to Darwin, changes brought on by industrialization, and her continuing battles over publication with Charles Dickens, Schor re-orients discussion of the seemingly ahistorical forms of the novel. Drawing on the insights of feminist and Marxist criticism, Schor re-opens the question of nineteenth-century female authorship, and makes a sustained argument for Gaskell's centrality to the traditions of the novel and of women's writing. This illuminating study tells two parallel stories: the difficult evolution of a woman novelist, and the "story" of the heroine across the progress of Gaskell's work.