SOURCE: "Mothers and Daughters I: Gaskell's Stories of the Mother's Word and the Daughter's Fate," in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 223-50.

In the following essay, Homans claims that Mary Barton and "Lizzie Leigh" are both enactments of a dialogue between mother and daughter, a dialogue that hinges on the transmission of the written word.

Central to Gaskell's myth of herself as a writer who put her duties as a woman ahead of her writing is the story of how she began to write seriously. In 1845 her ten-month-old son, William, died of scarlet fever, and "it was to turn her thoughts from the subject of her grief that, by her husband's advice, she attempted to write a work of some length."¹ This work was Mary Barton, her first novel, published in 1848 with a preface that encodes...