CityLife

Preview: Elizabeth Gaskell's Life In Her Own Words

A plaque marks Elizabeth Gaskell's former home in Longsight

Capitol Theatre, All Saints, MMU - June 16, 2010 

Even if Elizabeth Gaskell has been stolen by the ‘bonnet brigade’, actress Gabrielle Drake says she’s an incredibly complex character who could make even today’s women feel powerless.

A keen traveller,  fashion connoisseur,  social critic,  well-educated mother of four and one of Manchester’s best-known writers, the minister’s wife was a powerful figure  when women were still the underclass.

It’s this side of Gaskell that Gabrielle – actress, playwright and sister of folk legend Nick Drake – hopes her one-woman show  Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life In Her Own Words, at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Capitol Theatre, will spell out.

“What I rather like about her is she’s a modern woman – she loved having fun,” says Gabrielle, who has been a Gaskell enthusiast since reading Jenny Uglow’s biography, A Habit of Stories.

“Unlike some of the rarefied female writers of the 19th century, like Jane Austen who locked herself away alone and George Eliot who went to Italy to write, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her novels at the kitchen table in the thick of family life: watching her husband  dealing with his church affairs, looking after the children and dealing with domestic chores like pickling pigs.”

Three Gaskell books – Cranford, North And South, and Wives And Daughters – have been treated to BBC period adaptations, in keeping with when they were written.

But, in the bi-centenary year of Gaskell’s birth, the morals of her stories (such as the single mother and titular character of her 1853 book Ruth, or the socially divisive effects of an industrial revolution played out in her debut novel Mary Barton) still resonate in modern life.

Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, including Chinese. “In China, they have found that Mary Barton is incredibly relevant because that’s what’s happening to them now,” says Janet Allen, chairwoman of The Gaskells’ House, at 84, Plymouth Grove, Longsight, where Elizabeth wrote all but one of her novels.

“I’m sorry that she’s been typified as the bonnet brigade a little too much. There’s a whole other side to her: she wrote about complex women, literacy, social reform, trade unions.

“Her husband was very supportive but she ran her own life. She bought a house without telling him what she was doing, which shows how independently-minded she was.”

Her letters, novels and short stories reveal Elizabeth to have been a lively woman with a fine sense of humour. For example, she was a published biographer (of Charlotte Bronte), but it did not discourage her from scribbling the instruction to ‘Burn this!’ on all her correspondence to avoid their use by biographers and historians.

Fortunately, not all her correspondents obeyed her orders, and a number of comprehensive collections of her letters to more than 100  friends have  been published. It is from these that Gabrielle drew the script for her play, co-written with Richard Digby Day (and performed  in 2006 as Dear Scheherazade at the Royal Exchange).

“I suggested doing something with Richard and he said, ‘Why don’t you do a one-woman show based on Cranford’,” Gabrielle recalls.

“My only experience of Cranford was at school when I couldn’t get through it. But  Cranford is quite the wrong book to give to a child because it’s so full of compassion, gentle humour and irony that it’s lost on a schoolgirl.

“It is  a most enchanting social document about the last society of women who had certain means but not enough to keep properly body and soul together. Reading that was when I started to understand Elizabeth Gaskell. And  I realised that I’ve been up to Manchester a lot with the Royal Exchange and she and her husband operated across the road  at the Cross Street chapel.

“You can still feel the past in Manchester,  that it was the hub of the Industrial Revolution and you got extremes of poverty and wealth there.”

Uglow’s biography introduced Gabrielle to Gaskell as a fun-loving woman, sailing off around the world and writing letters to her girls about  fashion.  “She didn’t fit easily into her role of minister’s wife. She refused to be on committees of do-gooders and would go off and do her work individually.”

The play, set in Gaskell’s dining room, is a creative peek into Elizabeth’s busy imagination and life. “Her letters are the most lively and witty pieces of writing and very human. Elizabeth  loved telling stories and loved nothing more than sitting round the fire with her friends, so we’ve tried to recreate that.”

The staging coincides with the completion of the first stage of renovations to the Gaskell house. The  scaffolding for  a £750,000 upgrade of the exterior has gone  and  a blue plaque has appeared at long last.  The show is part of  efforts to raise £2m to overhaul the interior and create a museum and visitor centre there.

Gabrielle says: “It’s a marvellous house and when you visit  those books come to life. It is a jewel in the heart of Manchester.”

£15. Tickets  from the  box office (0161 247 1306) or  Margery Schofield, 202 Moston Lane East, New Moston, M40 3OH (0161 681 1439, margery09@btinternet.com) with a cheque payable to The Gaskell Society.