Still unequal after all this time

On July 22nd, the BBC’s premier radio arts programme, Front Row, celebrated the digitisation of the Elizabeth Gaskell manuscripts owned by the University of Manchester. This makes available to the public (not just academics and scholars) important Gaskell letters, and the manuscript of her last novel, Wives and Daughters, abruptly terminated by her death before its completion. Nothing could be more redolent of Gaskell’s incessantly pen-driven existence than the manuscript of a novel whose imaginative life could never be closed as she herself had intended. The digitisation of these documents, made possible by what the University of Manchester boasts as ‘cutting-edge technology’ (www.manchester.ac.uk) opens up to anyone the magical moment of composition, and revision, through the actual hand of the writer – andthough her own given name didn’t matter. That was how she was known in the nineteenth century; but the Brontës were known then as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Elizabeth Barrett wrote a large proportion of her works, including Sonnets From the Portuguese, when she was single. She was a renowned poet before she met Robert Browning, who approached her as a fan of her poetry. In getting to know her, through visits and a long epistolary romance, he conducted himself as very much the junior literary partner. In 1850, four years after their marriage, she was put forward as a serious candidate for the Poet Laureateship after Wordsworth’s death. Yet now her poetic importance lacks representation on both second-hand bookshop and university library shelves. And another Elizabeth, Gaskell,