Newly Published: Paul Mitchell, Gaskell and the Law (Hart, 2025)

Newly published: Paul Mitchell, University College London, Faculty of Laws, has published Gaskell and the Law (Hart Publishing, 2025). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This is the first ever study of law in the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell is best known today as a novelist of social realism. Until now, however, her use of law, which is crucial to her portrait of society, has never been systematically explored. This book shows that Gaskell's fiction is rich with insights into the law of her time, and that reading her work with a lawyer's eye deepens and enriches the reading experience. The book explores Gaskell's work as a whole. It gives careful attention to her most famous novels, but also engages with the lesser-known novels and the shorter fiction, showing that these often overlooked works contain a wealth of original ideas and legal interest. Gaskell's fiction is shown consistently demonstrating a skilled, accurate and critical handling of legal rules and a sensitivity to law's personal and social effects. She does not limit herself to mid-nineteenth century issues, but enters into such fundamental questions as the individual's obligation to obey the law, and the relation between law and fiction. The book shows that a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Gaskell's genius as writer is that she integrates this sophisticated engagement with law seamlessly, so that it contributes to the cumulative artistic effect of her work. As a leading scholar of Victorian legal history, Paul Mitchell brings an in-depth knowledge of the law to his close readings of Gaskell. He brings out the richness and sophistication of Gaskell's engagement with the law, and proposes both new readings and new valuations of this important novelist's work.

 

Order online at www.hartpublishing.co.uk – use the code GLR BD8 to get 20% off!

If you are interested in reviewing this book for the L&H Blog, please let me know at ccorcos@lsu.edu.

ICYMI: Lee on The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

ICYMI:

Julia Sun-Joo Lee has published The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2012). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of writings by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other former slaves on British fiction in the years between the Abolition Act and the Emancipation Proclamation. Julia Sun-Joo Lee argues that novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to British culture.

Victorian Law and Literature

Volume 5, number 2 (Winter 2013) of Victorian Network features the theme Victorians and the Law: Literature and Legal Culture, edited by Cathrine O. Frank. The content is quite interesting and includes pieces by Professor Frank, Cécile Bertrand on early Victorian broadsides, Erica McCrystal on nineteenth century crime fiction, M. Colleen Willenbring on Harriet Martineau's The Town, and Alison Moulds on Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Download the entire issue at this link.

Again, thanks to Simon Stern, University of Toronto, for alerting me to this publication.