Nicky Penttila

So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I can’t stop marvelling over it. Here’s 19-year-old Margaret turning down a surprise offer of marriage:

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been doing. I cannot answer as you want me to do, and yet I should feel so sorry if I vexed you.”
(From NORTH AND SOUTH (1855) Norton critical edition 2005, p. 58)

She is just as direct about what she as a southern stranger sees in the northern town of Manchester, as the city girds for a factory-workers’ strike:

“You think it [Manchester society] strange. Why?”

“I don’t know—I suppose becaue, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.”
(NORTH AND SOUTH, p. 109)

While “vexed” may date the first extract, there’s nothing in the wording that would make you think it was written more than 150 years ago. And it’s just as true now, feels just as impossible, and just as sad.
This story wasn’t deep history to Gaskell; hers is a “contemporary novel.” Reading it challenges me to see if I can write such a clear commentary on my own times. After my first couple of manuscripts came out so flat, I decided I couldn’t, and my next ones and this new NaNo one I’ve planned are set as historicals. They still treat common themes (meaning of family, definition of home, roles of women, one’s place and duty to one’s society) that are relevant in my times, but at a safe distance.

Maybe it’s time to try for currency as well as relevance again. Or maybe this is just cold-feet-just-as-the-writing-project-starts pondering; a familiar refrain. We’ll see how I feel on the backside of a month of novelwriting frenzy.

p.s. Our bookclub read this month was BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat. Lovely but slight, it read to me like a lyrical series of short stories with not much sinew between. A great voice, and another story of generations of women struggling and surviving, as in our previous reads, HOUSE OF SPIRITS and BRIEF, WONDEROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO.

Next month (Dec.): MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie.