The Provincial Fiction of Mitford, Gaskell and Eliot

• Traces a chain of influence among three highly significant women writers of the nineteenth century: Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot
• Reconsiders the literary category of provincialism and the genre of the village story with due consideration of a range of publication formats and contexts
• Works across literary periods to offer innovative rereadings of several important Romantic- and Victorian-era texts
• Combines nineteenth-century cultural-historical and literary analysis to advance recent revaluations of liberalism by considering its emotive and not just its ratiocinative dimensions

In this lively and illuminating work, Kevin A. Morrison offers a reassessment of Mary Russell Mitford’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s provincial fiction, sometimes deprecated within a genre frequently considered ‘minor literature’, and demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of George Eliot’s liberalism in the age of high realism. Although Gaskell was influenced by Mitford, and Eliot by Gaskell, only a handful of scholars have considered the affinities and resemblances among them. None have done so in depth. Establishing a chain of influence, this book examines the three authors’ interrelated careers: the challenges they encountered in achieving distinction within the literary sphere; the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers, and editors; and the career-enhancing possibilities afforded, and the limitations imposed, by different modes of publication. Attending to publication history, genre, and narrative voice, Morrison suggests new ways to think about provincialism, liberalism, and women’s networked authorship in the nineteenth century.