Short Story Writers From England

"In private life Mrs. Gaskell was distinguished for a large-hearted but unobtrusive benevolence, which secured her sympathy for any good cause, and led her to devote much time and strength to personal and helpful intercourse with her poorer neighbours. It was doubtless in this manner that she acquired the intimate acquaintance with the life of the lower, middle, and working classes, which gave much of their peculiar interest to her writings. Her conversational powers were very remarkable, and her society was much sought in some of the highest and most cultivated circles of London and Paris. Few persons could leave behind them a larger number of attached friends."

"In Manchester, of course, it [Mary Barton] was the topic of the hour, and practically all the readers in that city were divided into two camps: those who thought the book realistic, and those who regarded it as unfairly exaggerated. The employers of labour complained of the way in which they were portrayed in its pages; and it cannot be denied that they had a grievance, for the sympathies of the authoress were so obviously with the workmen. She looked at the social problem entirely from the point of view of the poor; and, while she did not omit to indicate the faults of the lower class, she could not bring herself to depict the merits of the other. It was heart against head with her, and at this time, if she saw life largely, she did not yet see it whole. The employers seemed well-to-do and happy, and she did not endeavour to penetrate beneath the surface. The employés were poor, discontented, uncertain of work, poorly paid; they had miserable lives and terrible dwellings. What wonder she wrote with bitterness? What wonder that the woman who accompanied some real Barton and Wilson to the "home" of the miserable Davenports lost, temporarily, the sense of proportion?"

"[P]eople on Turkey carpets, with their three meat meals a-day, are wondering, forsooth, why working men turn Chartists and Communists. Do they want to know why? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know why poor men, kind and sympathising as women to each other, learn to hate law and order, Queen, Lords and Commons, country-party, and corn-law leaguer, all alike—to hate the rich, in short? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know what can madden brave, honest, industrious North-country hearts, into self-imposed suicidal strikes, into conspiracy, vitriol-throwing, and midnight murder? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know what drives men to gin and opium, that they may drink and forget their sorrow, though it be in madness? Let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to get a detailed insight into the whole ‘science of starving,’—‘clemming,’ as the poor Manchester men call it? Why people ‘clem,’ and how much they can ‘clem’ on; what people look like while they are ‘clemming’ to death, and what they look like after they are ‘clemmed’ to death, and in what sort of places they lie while they are ‘clemming;’ and who looks after them, and who—oh, shame unspeakable!—do not look after them while they are ‘clemming;’ and what they feel while they are ‘clemming,’ and what they feel while they see their wives and their little ones ‘clemming’ to death round them; and what they feel, and must feel, unless they are more or less than men, after all are ‘clemmed’ and gone, and buried safe out of sight, never to hunger, and wail, and pine, and pray for death any more forever? Let them read Mary Barton. Lastly, if they want to know why men learn to hate the Church and the Gospel, why they turn sceptics, Atheists, blasphemers, and cry out in the blackness of despair and doubt, ‘Let us curse God and die,’ let them read Mary Barton."

"Mrs. Gaskell likewise published some sketches of life in a small country town, which were contributed to Household Words under the title of Cranford; it is the purest piece of humoristic description that has been added to British literature since Charles Lamb."

"Madame George Sand said, some months ago, in conversation with an English friend, "Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish—she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and which every girl will be the better for reading.""

"If in Mary Barton the bias is in favour of the working classes, it must be conceded that in North and South (published seven years later) the other side of the picture is shown. Mrs. Gaskell was still as full of sympathy with the labourer, but experience had taught her much. Still puzzled by seeing "two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own," she realised that the manufacturers, as a class, were not mere bloated capitalists, but level-headed, hard-working men, fighting against heavy odds for their livelihood. Also, she saw more clearly that the misery of the labourers was sometimes brought about by improvidence, and that much unhappiness was caused by the tyranny of the trades-unions of that day."

"Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story [North and South]; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure."

"I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages... I should set a value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would attract attention and do good."

"She is a very kind cheery woman in her own house; but there is an atmosphere of moral dulness about her, as about all Socinian women."

"All the other novels were written with the consciousness of power, and it is easy to see that the authoress had no misgivings. They will all live long, but Cranford will never be allowed to die. Admirable as are all the rest, Cranford stands out unique, individual, not only as the masterpiece of the writer, but as an acknowledged masterpiece of English literature."

"It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt."

"Some errors may certainly be detected in the details of your work [Mary Barton], but the wonder is that they are so few in number and so trifling in effect. The dialect I think might, have been given better, and some few incidents set forth with greater effect, but in describing the dwellings of the poor, their manners, their kindliness to each other, their feelings towards their superiors in wealth and station their faults, their literary tastes, and their scientific pursuits, as old Job Legh for example, you have been very faithful; of John Bartons, I have known hundreds, his very self in all things except his fatal crime, whilst of his daughter Mary, who has ever seen a group of our Lancashire factory girls or dress makers either, and could not have counted Mary? Nor is Jem Wilson, and I [am] proud to say it, a solitary character in the young fellows of our working population, noble as he is, but my heart fills as I write, and I cannot go on."

"In truth there is no bodily or mental evil to which flesh is heir which this author cannot describe most feelingly—The evils consequent upon ever manufacturing or over population or both conjoined and acting as cause and effect—the misery and the hateful passions engendered by the love of gain and the accumulation of riches, and the selfishness and want of thought and want of feeling in master manufacturers are most admirably described and the consequences produced on the inferior class of employed or unemployed workmen are most ably shewn in action."

"A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly."

"I'll not listen to reason…Reason always means what someone else has got to say."

"I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent."

"I finished reading Mary Barton last night, my feelings having become so interested in the narrative that I could not lay the book down until I had read to the end. You have drawn a fearfully true picture: a mournfully beautiful one also have you placed on the tables of the drawing rooms of the great, and good it must there effect; good for themselves, and good also I hope for the poor of every occupation. You are a genius, of no ordinary rank; I care not what the critics say, nor will I flatter you, if I know it, but truth, such as it appears to me will I dare to express, with whomsoever I may differ about it. It seems to me that you have begun a great work and I do hope you will not be discouraged from going on with it. You have opened and adventured into a noble apartment of a fine old dwelling house and on one of the English oaken pannels [sic] you have worked a picture from which the eyes cannot be averted nor the hearts best feelings withdrawn. A sorrowfully beautiful production it is, few being able to contemplate it with tearless eyes—I could not, I know."

"There is a new novel coming out by a British man-Kazuo Ishiguro. He is so good. He's about 35 years old; this is his third book. The command of language-his language is so superior. The moment that you start reading his book you enter the land of story, because of the way the words are put together. God, that man is so good!"

"[Kazuo Ishiguro], in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

"Well, this is a surprise. If you aren't here to give me trouble, then why are you here?"

"This is all strictly against regulations, of course, and Marie-Claude should never have asked you in. And naturally, I should have turned you out the second I knew you were here. But Marie-Claude doesn't care much for their regulations these days, and I must say, neither do I."

"It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to."

"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading."

"Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly."

"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."

"Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with."

"She said we weren't being taught enough."

"What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?"

"Kath, I've been looking all over for you. I mean't to say sorry. I mean, I'm really, really sorry. I honestly didn't mean to hit you the other day. I wouldn't dream of hitting a girl, and even if I did, I'd never want to hit you. I'm really, really sorry."

"'At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal.'"

"It'll come off. If you can't get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody."

"Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there."

"My donors have always tended to do much better than expected."

"And I'm a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up."

"Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth."

"It never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel being seen like that."

"Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose."

"If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture."

"I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing." ... I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that."

"I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one."

"After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful."

"I won't be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I've got a lot out of it, I have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest."

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."

"It is now some twenty minutes since the man left, but I have remained here on this bench to await the event that has just taken place – namely, the switching on of the pier lights. As I say, the happiness with which the pleasure-seekers gathering on this pier greeted this small event would tend to vouch for the correctness of my companion’s words; for a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment."

"The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside."

"Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone."

"She was the perfect cliché among dear little old ladies, down to the very lavender bags she placed among her linen."

"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."

"Man is a complex being who makes deserts bloom and lakes die."

"One thing that's good about procrastination is that you always have something planned for tomorrow."