Novels and Nature: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Flowering World
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
September 29, 1810
Today we celebrate that most earnest observer of gardens and humanity, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose pen moved as deftly between social commentary and nature's beauty as she moved between her writing desk and garden tasks.
Picture our dear authoress in her Manchester home, where she balanced the demands of novel writing with the satisfying labor of "spudding up dandelions."
As she confided to her daughter Marianne:
It is hard work writing a novel all morning, spudding up dandelions all afternoon, and writing again at night.
How fascinating that Elizabeth's friendship with Charlotte Brontë began in a summer garden!
Yet more delightful still is the image of the shy Charlotte seeking refuge behind curtains rather than face unexpected visitors to the Gaskell home.
A true gardener's soul speaks through Elizabeth's novels, where every blossom and fragrance carries meaning.
Consider this exquisite dawn scene from Ruth:
With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red came above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth...waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.
Her special affection for roses threads through her work, yet she understood that love transforms even the simplest bloom into something precious, as she reveals in Wives and Daughters:
I would far rather have two or three lilies of the valley gathered for me by a person I like than the most expensive bouquet that could be bought!
Even as she chronicled the lives of the poor and wrote seminal works like Mary Barton, Cranford, and North and South, Elizabeth never strayed far from the garden's influence.
Indeed, one might say she viewed human nature through the lens of her beloved flowers - both requiring careful tending, understanding, and room to grow toward the light.