The team who made Pride and Prejudice into the hottest BBC drama for years are now filming a novel by Mrs Gaskell. David Gritten goes on set to investigate.
For more than a century, Elizabeth Gaskell has ranked firmly in the second division of English Victorian novelists, her reputation eclipsed by Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes. But this is all about to change. Next year will certainly see a re-evaluation of Mrs Gaskell, as well as a dramatic upswing in her popularity with the reading public.
That much is guaranteed by a four-part BBC adaptation of her last, incomplete novel, Wives and Daughters. It is no routine costume drama, for its creative team is led by the producer Sue Birtwistle and scriptwriter Andrew Davies, who made Austen’s Pride and Prejudice a national phenomenon and a huge international seller for the BBC.
Wives and Daughters is the first series since Pride and Prejudice on which Birtwistle and Davies have collaborated. It stems from the BBC’s eagerness to find another classic drama with comparable appeal; thus the Corporation told the pair they could bestow the television treatment on any book they wished.
Mrs Gaskell may not seem the most obvious choice for Birtwistle and Davies, but the work of most leading 19th-century novelists has been heavily plundered for film and television. For example, all Jane Austen’s six major novels were adapted for the screen in the last five years.
And Birtwistle and Davies genuinely deem Wives and Daughters to be a neglected masterpiece. “It’s strong, direct and passionate,” said Birtwistle, supervising shooting in the tranquil village of Marshfield, near Bath, which stands in for Gaskell’s fictional Hollingford (itself based on Knutsford, Cheshire, where she grew up). “I think it’s her best book.”
It certainly has the elements necessary for a popular classic television drama. A middle-England novel first published in 18 monthly episodes in The Cornhill Magazine, starting in 1864, it is actually set some 40 years earlier, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Its heroine, Molly Gibson (played by Justine Waddell), has been brought up her widower father (Bill Paterson), Hollingford’s doctor. But when Molly is 17 he marries a meddling, absurd woman (Francesca Annis) with a beautiful daughter, Cynthia (Keeley Hawes). Much of the plot centres around the girls’ romances, and their dealings with the local squire’s sons; the seemingly brilliant, dazzling Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) and his quieter, solid brother Roger (Anthony Howell).
Wives and Daughters is strongly autobiographical. Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810; her mother died the next year. Raised in Knutsford by an aunt, the child lived briefly with her father and stepmother before his death. Loss plagued her life; after she married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, and settled in Manchester, their first child was born dead. Their only son died of scarlet fever as a baby.
Yet Gaskell was also a cosmopolitan woman who often visited the Continent. She hobnobbed with literary figures such as Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte and Dickens, who asked her to write for his periodical Household Words. Mrs Gaskell also befriended Charles Darwin, on whom Roger Hamley of Wives and Daughters is clearly based.
“She was enormously popular in her lifetime,” says Jo Pryke, who edits the Gaskell Society Journal, “but then there was a dip in her popularity. She was regarded as ‘sweet little Mrs Gaskell’ until the 1960s, when Marxist critics reclaimed her as a writer of industrial novels. And more recently feminists have taken her up. She was a devoted wife and mother but she wasn’t just sweet and submissive. She was psychologically acute, and Molly Gibson is a strong, independent young woman.”
Yet Mrs Gaskell has never been regarded as part of the Eng. Lit. canon and rarely appears on schools’ reading lists. Tellingly, though Sue Birtwistle grew up near Knutsford, she did not read Mrs Gaskell until she was 20.
“I think she was dismissed or overlooked by F. R. Leavis,” said Davies, “and it was he who determined what passed for advanced intellectual taste in those days. But the quality of writing in Wives and Daughters stunned me. It’s beyond everything else she did, and way up there with George Eliot in its authoritative feeling of what it’s like to be alive for a wide range of people.”
Like Birtwistle, Davies was no Mrs Gaskell expert until five years ago, when members of the Gaskell Society urged him to read Wives and Daughters with a view to adapting it. “I’d read North and South and heard Cranford on the radio. I assumed she was about a lot of old ladies gossiping, like Cranford, or social conscience books like North and South — a bit obvious and not at all intriguing.”
Meanwhile the Gaskell Society, though it lags behind the influential Jane Austen Society in numbers, is gathering momentum. It boasts almost 800 members world-wide and has a website meticulously maintained by a Japanese academic, Mitsuharu Matsuoka of Nagoya University.
Society members were flushed with excitement recently by the discovery of six letters written by Gaskell to her children’s nurse. The letters deal with mainly domestic matters — including a scandal about her pregnant but unwed cook. The Society paid pounds 2,000 to prevent them being auctioned; they will reside in Manchester’s John Rylands Library.
“One of the keys to Gaskell’s appeal today is that she was Unitarian,” says Jo Pryke. “Unitarians were not only real movers and shakers in 19th-century England, they were also pragmatic and non- judgmental. It shows in the letter about the cook. Gaskell makes no judgments about her behaviour. She was just sorry to lose her.”
On set, Justine Waddell and Keeley Hawes, looking fetching in long Regency-era dresses, sit on a bench beside a shady arbour in the garden of an imposing Georgian manor-house. They are discussing affairs of the heart. It’s an archetypal scene from a BBC costume drama, exquisite-looking and authentically detailed.
But there’s trouble in paradise, or at least in this stately recreation of it. Planes continually pass overhead, infuriating the sound-man. Two wood pigeons in an oak tree insist on cooing each time the actresses start speaking. Crew members clap wooden boards together, scaring the birds away. Even BBC classic serials, it appears, can only take so much reality.
The atmosphere on set is cheerful and open; visiting journalists may chat to whomever they wish. But one aspect of Wives and Daughters remains hush-hush: the ending, unresolved because of Mrs Gaskell’s death. The book breaks off in its 60th chapter, and its dramatic arc suggests she may have had only one more chapter left.
“It’s so clearly signalled that a happy ending is in store and Molly gets her just rewards,” said Davies. “But I think we’ve managed to give it a little twist which is perhaps pleasing and a bit unconventional.” “We had quite a debate about it,” added Birtwistle enigmatically. “It was clear what Gaskell wanted to happen. We’ve had to come up with the `how’.”
Not even the Gaskell Society purists seem to mind the liberties Davies has taken. “A major BBC prime-time serial is welcome,” says Jo Pryke. “People have been unbelievably patronising about Gaskell over the years. So we’re absolutely delighted.”
By David Gritten for The Sunday Telegraph London.
(Source: highbeam.com)