Mrs Gaskell and Me

by Nell Stevens

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘That is not true for everyone, of course. There are countless women who would have written if their lives had only been different: if there had not been a man, or if there had not been a baby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you have a hand in all of this. You have a choice to make, true, but once you have made it, there are more choices still: how you will act, how you will write, and when. What I meant to suggest is that you can address these questions as the author of your experiences, rather than just the critic.’

  The word she alights on, so out of place in the fluorescent-lit, sanitized hospital room – critic – makes me half sit up in bed, only to discover that post-surgery this is not a movement I can easily make. I yelp with pain.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she says.

  ‘Mrs Gaskell!’ I say. ‘I have to leave the hospital!’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘My viva! My viva is next week. I have to go home and prepare. I have to be ready to answer questions about you.’

  2016

  Viva

  ‘The viva voce,’ reads the King’s website, ‘(literally: live voice, or by the living voice) is an oral examination whereby your Ph.D. work is examined by two examiners, usually specialists in the field.’ By my living voice, I will defend my thesis against the attacks of an art historian who has published a book on the relationship between contagious diseases and artistic influence in nineteenth-century Rome, and a Romanticist who specializes in female travellers in Italy.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asks Joyce, when I call her to let her know I’ve been in hospital. ‘We can postpone.’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I want to get it done. I need it to be done.’

  Much as I’m dreading my viva, I’m appalled by the idea that it could be cancelled at the last minute. The three years of labour, anxiety and anticipation I spent working on my Ph.D. are irrevocably bound up in my mind with my relationship with Max. I am desperate to move on from my stultifying days in the library, and equally desperate to move on from him. So, the week after I am discharged from hospital, I shuffle into the Virginia Woolf building, into the same office where, eighteen months previously, I had my upgrade interview, and submit to another round of questioning.

  ‘We understand you haven’t been well,’ says the Romanticist, as I take my seat.

  This gives me hope that my examiners will take pity on me, and go easy on my work. In this, and in many other things, which I wrote in my thesis, I am rapidly proved incorrect.

  Issues my examiners have with my research:

  — Inadequate justification for choice of subjects: why have I chosen to write about Gaskell, Hosmer, Browning, Barrett Browning, Hawthorne, Story and not, say, Powers, Akers, Landor?

  — Inadequate justification for choice of timeframe: what is significant about the mid-century as opposed to, say, the first half? Why does it tail off so vaguely in the 1890s?

  — Inadequate demonstration that Rome was different to other sites of artistic collaboration in Italy. And why, in a thesis that claims to be about Rome, is there a peculiar and irrelevant section towards the end about Rodin and modernist sculpture in Paris?

  — Inadequate critical distinction between fiction and nonfiction sources.

  — There are some strange, misplaced commas in my bibliography.

  I listen to their complaints, and tell them why I think they are wrong, although I do not say what I believe to be the correct answer to most of their questions, with the exception of the comma issue: ‘Mrs Gaskell.’ I have chosen to write about Mrs Gaskell, and the people she knew and met in Rome. I have chosen to write about the mid-century because that is when Mrs Gaskell was there. I have focused on Rome because Mrs Gaskell was focused on Rome. It was the tip-top point of her life. Right at the beginning of this process, three years ago, I picked a subject, and that subject, it became clear, was Mrs Gaskell.

  The examiners do not seem pleased. I am not putting up a particularly good fight; I’m still on a lot of painkillers and my jeans, as I sit at the table, are digging into the incision in my stomach through which my ovary was removed: a zig-zag that descends from my belly button.

  The hands on the clock on Joyce’s shelf have leapt forward since I last looked. We have been doing this for nearly two hours, this back-and-forth of aggressive question and defensive answer. I realize that it is not going well, that they don’t like the thesis, that three years of work, and all that time I spent with Mrs Gaskell – the days in the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library, at Columbia, at the Harry Ransom Center – were wasted. Those reasons I gave Max as we wandered through the Louvre (a Ph.D. will help my writing; a Ph.D. will help me get a job; a Ph.D. will mean I’m an expert in something); none of them will mean much if, at the end of the process, I don’t actually get my Ph.D.

  ‘I think we’ll leave it there,’ says the Romanticist, and then, suddenly, it is over, and they have left the room.

  They haven’t told me the outcome, which I expected they would do at the end. I sit at the table for a moment, letting it sink in: they haven’t told me the outcome because they consider it perfectly obvious, from the issues they have raised and the tenor of the interrogation, that I have failed. I have failed.

  I push myself up to a standing position, a slow and painful process, and limp to the bathroom, where I lock myself in a cubicle to cry. I can’t face Joyce, or the other Ph.D. students, who will be waiting in the graduate student lounge, anxious to hear what happened, what I was asked, what it was like. I wish Mrs Gaskell would come to me again, but I’m not nearly spaced out or drugged up enough to summon her, and instead I sit on the toilet and confront the fact that I have let her down.

  My phone buzzes in my bag. I don’t want to look at it. My parents, brother, friends, are waiting to hear how the viva went, and I am going to have to tell them that I failed.

  It’s a text message from Joyce: ‘Congratulations! Can’t find you to tell you in person, but you passed. Apparently the examiners forgot to let you know?’

  1865

  Mortis

  Two things happened after you died.

  First: Meta wrote to Mr Norton, clarifying, not that clarification was required, that you had always loved him. ‘She was so faithful to you – so unswerving in her affection, not only to you, but to all that she had known through you; in her [ … ] longing for freedom and right to triumph in her “dear America”.’

  Second: Mr Norton’s daughter was born and named after you. You never reached America, but Elizabeth Gaskell Norton was a true child of the New World. She grew up in a big wooden house called Shady Hill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent her summers in Ashfield, roaming the dark American forests you dreamt of. Like her father, like you, she grew up to have famous friends: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling.

  I was going to write, ‘It never occurred to you that you were going to die.’ I was going to point out how busy you were, writing your new novel, Wives and Daughters, which was being serialized in the Cornhill Magazine. You were in the middle of purchasing and renovating a house in Hampshire called The Lawn, which you did without Mr Gaskell’s knowledge or sanction. He wouldn’t approve, so you planned to present it to him as a fait accompli: it was a way of forcing departure from Manchester after more than thirty years of barely tolerating your residence in the city.

  You wrote to Mr Norton to tell him about it: ‘I did a “terribly grand thing”! and a secret thing too! only you are in America and can’t tell. I bought a house and 4 acres of land’. It was bullish and deliberate of you, using your own money for your own ends; you lived to the last at the very boundaries of what was acceptable within the kind of marriage people did not gossip about.

  You were busy looking forward, but it’s possible this was because you were looking beyond yourself, your own lifetime. The Lawn would be a home for your unmarried daughters after you were gone – would provide the security th
at enabled Meta to paint, and to become a mountaineer, and never need a husband to provide for her. You were busy looking forward because your mind, increasingly, dragged you back. Your perpetual nostalgia had become chronic over the past year.

  Perhaps, after all, in the midst of your projects and plans, it had occurred to you that you were going to die. The last letter you wrote to Mr Norton seems so self-consciously a last letter, but it’s possible I only read it that way because I can see there are no more pages in the book, that after your sign-off on that final note – ‘with dear love to you all believe me ever your true and affectionate friend, E. C. Gaskell’ – is the back cover, red and fraying.

  Sometimes I dream I go over to Boston and see you and Susan and the little ones. But I always pass into such a cold thick damp fog, on leaving the river at Liverpool that I never get over to you. But my heart does; and I send my dear dear love.

  Those were very happy Roman days – I have loved America ever since.

  But life never flows back, – we shall never again have the old happy days in Rome, shall we?

  In the absence of touch, taste, smell, sound, all you shared with Mr Norton were memories and words. Across the Atlantic, you wrote to each other, you read each other from afar, and still, sometimes words failed. When Mr Norton read Sylvia’s Lovers, along with its American dedication, he sent you a letter of praise. But even then there was a gap in his writing, in place of what he meant to say. Words, he wrote, were insufficient:

  Since I last wrote to you, I have read Sylvia’s Lovers. Had I taken up the book by chance, not knowing who wrote it, I should have read it with deep interest, – and with tender, respectful admiration. But having had the happiness of knowing & loving you, and you having given me the book in a way that makes it very dear to me, – I have read it with such feeling as few other books have ever called out in me. It is impossible for me to say what I should like to say, – for the words do not convey when written the true impression of feeling.

  There was so much you could not say. There was so much you said indirectly. There was so much you said directly, which is now lost, the paper burned, disintegrated, torn, and which I will never read.

  In the Anglistica & Americana book of your letters that Max gave me, there is a fragment of a letter from Mr Norton to you. He is talking about evolutionary biology, about the phenomenal scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century (‘At any rate, I wait to be convinced that I am nothing but a modified fish!’), and how what had been discovered by contemporary scientists was a tiny fraction of the truth. ‘How little they know compared with what might be known!’ he wrote. And then, ‘It seems as’.

  There, the line stops. The editor has added a note: ‘[the ending to this letter is lost].’ The ending to this letter is lost. How little they know compared with what might be known. The ending to this letter is lost.

  When did you lose it, Mrs Gaskell? Or perhaps it wasn’t you who mislaid it. Perhaps it was Meta, tidying your papers, neglecting to pick up the last page. How little I know compared with what might be known.

  You took your girls to see The Lawn, gathering them around you as you always did, showing them the grounds, the rooms that would be theirs, the new furniture you had bought and the study where you would finish Wives and Daughters. You were full of talk and stories, and of all the possible things to be discussing when, mid-sentence, you gasped and died, you were talking about Rome. Letters sent by your friends after your death dwell on this fact, on the name of the city being your last word on earth.

  It is so absolutely like you as to seem implausible, that you keeled over mid-flow, full-throttle, with that word on your lips.

  I wish we could see you again, Mr Norton; we never thought it would be so long, did we, when we parted?

  2017

  Three Types of Ending for this Book

  When I started writing Mrs Gaskell and Me, I did not know how it would end. I was hurt, still, by Max, and the way things went. I was still, on occasion, angry. I had conversations with people about the forced, unnatural nature of the traditional narrative ending. It’s like trying to tie up the loose ends of an octopus, I complained. Nothing is ever over, I said. Nothing is ever done. My life does not stop because the book ends. How am I supposed to contrive an ending to an ongoing situation?

  Ending One: In which I do the thing I almost did when Max and I first broke up, and get on a plane to Boston. It is snowing, because it is always snowing in my imagined version of Boston, but not with the kind of oppressive, metaphysical snow that made Max feel trapped and overwhelmed; it will be a light, gleaming dusting that makes everything look picturesque. I send a text to Max and say, ‘Come to Lineage, right now’ (because, in this version, the restaurant has not closed down).

  I am already there, at our old table in the window, and before he arrives I order all the food we used to love, the tacos, the brioche rolls, the wine he likes. When Max arrives outside he sees me through the window, and pauses, looking in. His face is stricken, that old familiar petrified look, and I wave and gesture at him to come in, it’s freezing out there.

  Inside, he sits at the table, and his jacket is flecked with unmelted snow, and I say, ‘The reasons to be apart aren’t as good as the reasons not to be. Come on. Let’s get married,’ and he says, ‘OK.’

  We’ll have a wedding, the way our friends and siblings have had weddings, and maybe after that we’ll be happy, or we won’t.

  The second ending takes place many years in the future, when I am in LA, or New York, or Boston, and am more sophisticated than I am now, having learned the sorts of lessons one surely learns in one’s thirties and put them into practice with aplomb. I know exactly what to do with my hair, and the length to wear it that is not so short as to seem severe, but not so long as to seem unruly. I have an acute understanding of the shades of lipstick that work best with my complexion. I am definitely wearing sunglasses. I am probably wearing a hat.

  I have been doing something urbane and worldly, and as I come out of the place where I was doing it, I see, across the street, Max. He is sitting on a bench, reading The End of the Affair, and in surprise I call out.

  ‘Max!’ I shout. ‘Max!’ He looks up and freezes, and everything that has happened between us seems momentarily visible on his face. Then he crosses over to me, and kisses me on the cheek.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I say.

  ‘How’s John?’ he asks.

  (In this version, I have married and recently divorced a politician or a millionaire or a film producer called John, and have several charming and well-provided-for children.)

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘John? I wouldn’t know.’

  Max’s gaze meets mine for a second.

  He says, ‘Do you have time for a coffee?’ and either I do, or I don’t.

  The third ending happens in the hospital, as I lie on my trolley in the gynaecology ward after my operation, staring at a wall I will forever remember for some reason as pale blue, though my friends correct me and say it was white. I peel back the dressing to inspect the surgical wounds on my stomach. The skin is bulging where the seam is, with wisps of stitches poking through like the legs of an insect trying to escape. My belly button is unrecognizable. I expand my habit of metaphorical navelgazing to include literal navelgazing. There is a sense of finality in this: an end of something.

  I have one less body part today than I had yesterday. Somewhere else in the building, in a pathology lab, my enormous right ovary is sitting in a specimen bag, waiting to be tested.

  ‘You should consider your fertility options as a matter of some urgency,’ the consultant says, and instead of refusing to respond and having an existential meltdown about what it would mean to have children, or not to have children, and how the absence of Max in my life changes all of that, and dragging poor Mrs Gaskell into it, too, I just nod and say, ‘I will.’

  Because in this version, I have made a decision to take what I can have from life despite what I cannot; to make
the choices that are available to me; to be an author and not a critic. It is possible, I realize, to inhabit a world of half measures – of being in love and not in love, of having one ovary instead of two – and still do some things wholly. I understand that Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton never so much as kissed, but that they were in love from the moment they met, until the days they died, thousands of miles and forty-three years apart. I understand that I will never marry Max and also that part of me will always wonder what would have happened if I did. I understand that I can’t have him, but that what I can have, nonetheless, is a baby.

  And so I’ll return to the catalogue of sperm donors, and I’ll drink wine with Izra and Holly and Louise and make a game of it at first, filtering the online database by hair colour, or religion, or height and seeing what comes up. Then I’ll be serious, and imagine each of these generous, anonymous men as the father of my child, and I’ll imagine the child too: a beloved stranger. Soon after that, I’ll make a choice. I’ll fill out the paperwork. I’ll begin.

  This is not an ending in the way that Mrs Gaskell has an ending in this book. I do not die. Instead, I have reached a brief moment of clarity, and I have grasped hold of it. I have made a choice. Nothing is really over, but maybe the idea that things will ever be over is over.

  In all these scenarios, though, it is only fair that Mrs Gaskell gets a rewrite too. In these endings, Mrs Gaskell gets to go to America.

  The End: Mrs Gaskell Goes to America

  You couldn’t breathe easily until you had reached the open water. In your dreams you never made it that far, always floundering in the Liverpool docks before you found the ocean, always waking up before you truly set off. But the steamer was coasting through the waves, now, and if you stood on deck you could feel the air changing, the salt-laced wind, the clear, unfiltered quality of the light far out to sea.