I have attempted to read this book a couple of times and I never get very far before I lose interest.

I loved Stevens' first book and the quality of her writing is just as strong in this new biography.

There's enough background information to make this relevant to readers who aren't familiar with Gaskell but sufficient detail to keep advid fans engaged.

A very interesting read.

For some time I have had, “Bleaker House,” by Nell Stevens on my reading radar. It lingers on my seemingly endless, ‘to be read,’ list – has lingered so long, in fact, that her next book came out, “Mrs Gaskell and Me.” Having decided that I should just get on and read something by Ms Stevens, whose work intrigues me, I settled down to try this and I am so glad I did.

This is something between a fictionalised biography and a real life memoir; interspersing the author’s work on her PhD thesis, and her relationship with a man she is in love with, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s decision to flee to Rome just before her contentious biography of Charlotte Bronte was published, where she met, and fell in love with, Charles Eliot Norton.

There are similarities between the stories of this modern student and author, and that of Mrs Gaskell. Mrs Gaskell left for Rome in 1857. She was married and went to Rome with two of her daughters, hoping to escape the reviews and arguments over the biography of her friend. Her delight in the group of artists and writers she met in Rome, who included writers, poets, an actress and sculptors, were over shadowed by her feelings for Charles Norton. Meanwhile, our narrator is about to embark on a PhD about that nineteenth century community of artists and writers, while, like Mrs Gaskell, becoming embroiled in a relationship with a fellow student, who she had been in love with for some time.

Although the story itself is fascinating, what makes this work is the author’s voice, which is warm and interesting, full of humour and self deprecation. Nell Stevens tells a story of unrequited love, of feelings of loss and of the complicated, difficult way we negotiate human relationships. Some people may find it possibly too slow, or too dry. I thought it was beautiful and I will certainly go back and read her former book. I received a copy of this from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

I read The Life of Charlotte Brontë when I was thirteen and was appalled.  I couldn't believe someone had written a biography so demonstrably false.  About ten years later, I watched the BBC adaptation of North and South and fell in love with John Thornton.  Reading the book affirmed the impression and I decided maybe Mrs Gaskell had redeeming qualities.  However, Brooding about the Brontës two years ago brought back my original disgust.  I could not conceive of what kind of person Mrs Gaskell must be if she thought it was acceptable to go into the home of a grieving widower and a bereaved father, ignore their protests and carry off personal paperwork.  She concentrated on the yellowest gossip, twisted facts and buried whatever failed to suit her narrative.  Other than John Boyne and Philippa Gregory, there are few writers of whom I had a lower opinion.  Plans to investigate her books further were abandoned.  Yet, returning to my Brooding, I wondered if I was being unfair.  Although her biography may have unleashed a storm of myths and misconceptions about the Brontës, I began to see that she had not done so out of malice.  So, I decided to give Mrs Gaskell deserved one last chance and when I saw Mrs Gaskell and Me on Netgalley, it seemed the perfect opportunity.Bibliomemoirs tend to congregate around Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf or indeed the Brontës so I was intrigued to find someone who had that degree of passion around Elizabeth Gaskell.  Something about the way that she tends to be referred to by the title of 'Mrs' means that her undoubted talent as a writer sounds somehow secondary to her role as wife.  In many ways, this was a deliberate manoeuvre on her part.  She enjoyed the protection of being a wife and mother, a status that kept her safe from much of the speculation which beset the Brontë sisters.  Yet at the same time, Elizabeth Gaskell seems to have been restless, unwilling to settle for a wholly domestic life.  She wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë with the express intention of setting the cat among the pigeons but then ran and hid from the fall out.  The troublemaker streak seems to have been what Nell Stevens responded to, with Stevens selecting Gaskell as the focus of her PhD.  Mrs Gaskell and Me is like a shadow piece to Stevens' studies however, a far more personal analysis of Mrs Gaskell and her time in Rome with a running commentary going alongside concerning Stevens' own life.

While I picked up this book with the hope of discovering more about Gaskell's relationship with Charlotte Brontë, in fact Charlotte's main function is as catalyst rather than as a significant player in the memoir.  Picking up just after Gaskell completed the memoir of her friend, Charlotte is dismissed as being always a little ghostly, her deathly quality her defining characteristic.  Exhausted by her first (and ultimately last) venture into the world of non-fiction writing, Gaskell decided to flee the reviews and escape to Rome.  It was there that she met Charles Norton, the man who appears to have been the love of her life despite the fact that they were never able to be together, despite the fact that he was much younger, despite the fact that she was long married.  Flashing forward to 2013, Nell Stevens is juggling a trans-Atlantic long-distance relationship while also trying to write a thesis on the community of artists and writers living in Rome during Mrs Gaskell's stay.



I have always defended the bibliomemoir genre against those who complain that they are generally too personal to the author to offer meaningful understanding around a text.  Reading is an incredibly personal act, naturally people will have individual responses and sharing those can be fascinating.  However, Mrs Gaskell and Me feels like a slightly different creature.  The passages describing Gaskell's time in Rome are written in the second person which is a stylistic choice that to me always feels awkward.  The Gaskell sections have the feeling of a personal meditation, an attempt by Stevens to connect with the author of whom she is clearly so fond.  That is fine, but it did not quite work for me, with the line seeming confusingly blurred between whether this was fact or fiction.  How much of this actually happened?  It was far from obvious.  By contrast, the accompanying chapters on Stevens' unhappy relationship felt far more immediate and compelling but from early on felt laden with doom.  This never felt like it would end well.

What does this mean though for my own version of 'Mrs Gaskell and Me'?  If I found Stevens' book a little muddled, does that mean that Elizabeth Gaskell too has blown her last chance?  Oddly enough, no.  Despite the imperfections in the telling, I found Stevens' enthusiasm for her subject to be truly engaging.  The way she explained that she 'had never encountered a writer who could fill a page so entirely with her self, and haven't since' made me think about what drew people to Gaskell in the first place.  She was chatty, charming, witty and gossipy.  She was a story-teller.  Stevens made Elizabeth Gaskell the woman seem alive to me beyond the caricature of Brontë mythology.  I could even almost feel for her through Stevens' imagined version of Gaskell's distress upon returning from Rome to the law suit from Branwell's seducer Mrs Robinson.  Elizabeth Gaskell was a dissatisfied woman who dared to try find her happiness.  There was something truly beautiful in the enigma within her letters that Stevens is never quite able to decode - Gaskell never visited America but she dreamed of it, yet did she write that in her dreams it looked like 'Rome' or was the word 'home'?

I came to a much deeper and richer understanding of Elizabeth Gaskell through Mrs Gaskell and Me.  She seems to have been a woman deeply interested in others, someone who wanted to make the lives of others  better.  Her methods were not always above board or even admirable, but she meant well.  As Stevens imagines a conversation of her own with Gaskell, I could see the appeal to talking to her.  Gaskell was one of those gloriously busy women who had an opinion on everything and everyone - how could one fail to be drawn to her?  I can see that just as the Brontë legend became caught up in the version of it told by Elizabeth Gaskell, so too has she been defined by it.  There was so much more to Gaskell than the magnificent mess of The Life and Stevens' shining love for her despite the centuries that separate the two gives the book a depth of feeling beyond its content.  I could only wish good things for Stevens and the future which lies ahead of her and peace for the shade of the author she so admires.

This might be a bit of an acquired taste as Nell Stevens, a PhD student at Kings, London, writes a book about ‘Nell Stevens’, a PhD student at Kings, London... The introduction states upfront that ‘this is a work of imagination’ – and in a way it’s the anti-thesis that Stevens couldn’t write telling as it does the imaginatively-reconstructed story of Elizabeth – Lily, who knew? – Gaskell’s understated but important love affair with Charles Eliot Norton, an American whom she met in Rome. Undocumented other than between the lines, unsourced and unspoken, Stevens has found a clever way to imaginatively reconstruct emotions that are too untethered, too lacking in solid textual evidence to find their way into a real thesis.

Interspersed with Gaskell’s imagined story, is that of Nell herself: both her troubled love life with the elusive Max, and her PhD 'journey'. The latter is both funny and also eminently recognisable: the solitary nature of doctoral study, the sometimes weirdness of other peoples’ research (‘human-pig relationships in <I>Jude the Obscure’</I>!), the ‘work in progress’ seminars.

Stevens has a strong voice and I was happy to let her lead me through this somewhat fragmented story that balances somewhere between novelised biography and fictional memoir.

I should really stop reading stories that are by/about writers failing at their PhDs, they so often end up occupying a no-mans-land between fiction and academia that I find intensely irritating. In this offering of fictionalised biolgraphy and autobiography Nell's thesis on Mrs Gaskell is plagued by vagueness and a lack of commitment as well as the long-distance relationship she struggles to maintain with her partner between London and Paris and then London and Boston. Simultaneously there is a fragmentary second person narrative of Elizabeth's Gaskell's stay in Rome immediately following the publication of her controversial biography of Charlotte Bronte and her subsequent relationship with writer Charles Norton.

The problem for me was that Nell's narrative was frankly uninteresting. I could feel little sympathy with her academic woes (how on earth does one person manage to build a thesis around the misinterpretation of a single word, not once but twice?!) and I found myself echoing the weary questions of her professors and supervisors as they questioned her intent, her focus and the very point of her writing. Then I found myself asking the same questions about the story in front of me.

The Gaskell sections were so brief and lacking in depth and development that it really did feel like a faux-intellectual gloss intended to pad out the rather tepid contemporary love story. There was little sense of the characters (even worse when the fictionalisation is surely intended to breathe life into the fragmentary evidence that remains) despite the sad unconsummated love-story that lies at its heart.

There is little to link the two stories together except the vaguest sense of doomed love and the nebulous, unformed thesis. It needs more focus, more depth, more engagement and more commitment as the two stories put together fail to successfully redress the weaknesses of either.