The Poor Clare

Description

The haunting novella The Poor Clare is one of Elizabeth's Gaskell's Gothic tales. It tells the story of Bridget Fitzgerald, who unwittingly puts a curse on her own estranged daughter and the granddaughter she did not know existed. When she discovers that the curse has fallen on her own kin, Bridget submits herself to the rituals of an obscure religious sect, hoping to lift the curse. The Poor Clare sensitively treats issues of class and Catholic and Protestant religious tension in Victorian England, making this an innovative and thrilling gem from Gaskell's wide-ranging oeuvre.

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865) was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who resigned his position on conscientious grounds. Her mother died a year after her birth, and Gaskell spent her formative years in the care of relatives in northern England. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a well-known Unitarian minister, and joined him to work among the poor for social reform. They had four daughters, as well as a son who died in infancy. His death left Gaskell so distraught that she began writing for distraction. Her first major success was the novel Mary Barton (1848)-published, as were her first several works of short fiction, under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. For many years, she also wrote regularly for Charles Dickens's magazine, Household Words, contributing stories and a serialized novel, Cranford. Meanwhile, the Gaskells' home in Manchester became a popular stop for writers and reformers, including Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, and Charlotte Bronte, who became a close friend. After Bronte's death, her father, Patrick Bronte, asked Gaskell to write her biography. The Life of Charlotte Bronte proved a pioneering and controversial psychological study of Bronte's family life, and remains perhaps the most important book on the writer. Gaskell died of a heart attack in 1865. A memorial to her lies at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.