Mrs Gaskell and Me

Author/Guide: Nell Stevens

Why a Booktrail?

1857, 2013: The story of Elizbeth Gaskell and her quest to write about The Brontes.

ISBN: 978-1509868186
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn’t stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration, and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends, and a man – Charles Norton – who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell’s life, though they would never be together.

In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her Ph.D. – about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century – and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city. As Nell chases her heart around the world, and as Mrs Gaskell forms the greatest connection of her life, these two women, though centuries apart, are drawn together.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Gaskell – From Manchester to Rome

Two main locations in the novel are Manchester where Elizabeth Gaskell lived and Rome, where she travels to in later life and meets Doctor Nelson.

Many events in this story are fictionalized or indeed fiction themselves – this the imagined story of Gaskell’s understated but important love affair with Charles Eliot Norton, an American whom she met in Rome. The story is helped along by Nell who is investigating this in the present day and writing it into a thesis.

Dr Norton gives a great guided tour of the city of Rome and you should definitely visit the Colosseum and the catacombs in particular.

In Manchester, a must visit is of course the house of the great novelist herself.