Despite feminist reassessments to the contrary, the conventional
view that Elizabeth Gaskell personified the Victorian feminine
ideal is still very much in place today. Challenging that view in
an experimental biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there
lived in ""Mrs. Gaskell"" another, antithetical self, a daemonic
double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature
born to be a ""gypsy-bachelor."" Bonaparte does not dispute that
""Mrs. Gaskell"" did exist, but she suggests that Gaskell conceived
her, as much as any fictional character, out of a desperate need
produced by her childhood experience of rejection and abandonment,
in order to gain the love of friends and family and the approval of
the world. Gaskell herself, Bonaparte argues, told the story of her
double in images encoded in her letters, fiction, and life. Using
the methods of literary criticism for biographical ends, Bonaparte
traces a pattern of these images, showing how a metaphor that may
turn up as a figure of speech in one of Gaskell's letters may be
embodied in a character in one of her short stories, dramatized in
an incident or plot in one of her novels, and even actualized in an
action or a relationship in her life. To reach the inner woman,
Bonaparte claims, it is necessary to ""read"" Gaskell's letters,
fiction, and life as a single poetic text. In addition to
presenting a radically different interpretation both of Gaskell and
of her literary work, Bonaparte's unique approach opens up
interesting possibilities in a number of other areas: in the
writing of biography, in the analysis of metaphor in the
nineteenth-century novel, in the study of the relationship between
literature and life, in the exploration of links between the inner
and outer self, and in women's studies generally.
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