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his elder daughter, Grace’s sister, and her baby from the home. In her old age, however, Grace is fated to witness the repetition of herself and her father in this melodramatic scene, the shock of which strikes her with palsy so that ‘she was carried to her bed that night never to rise again’. Thus in this story the daughter and the father conspire together to ruin the lives of an unhappy mother and her daughter.
    Gaskell again describes the woman who turns against another in complicity with an inflexibly self-righteous father in ‘Lois the Witch’. Lois’s father, a Barford minister, refuses to come to the aid of a woman who is being stoned and drowned for a witch; in response the witch turns her curse on Lois, rather than the father, crying, ‘Parson’s wench, parson’s wench, yonder, in thy nurse’s arms, thy dad hath never tried for to save me, and none shall save thee when thou art brought up for a witch.’ Lois goes on to tell her New England audience, ‘I used to dream that I was in that pond, all men hating me with their eyes because I was a witch.’ The woman’s curse comes true and Lois must be punished for the sin of her father in an uncanny doubling of women’s fates.
    Perhaps the text which is most overtly devoted to the representation of women’s investment in the domestic sphere and the pull of the id="page_xxiv" maternal bond is ‘The Poor Clare’. In a letter dated 2 January 1856, Charles Dickens impatiently beseeched Elizabeth Gaskell to end her delay and complete her manuscript so he could publish the conclusion in
Household Words:
‘I have been going on, hoping to see the end of the story you could not finish (which was not your fault or anybody’s) in time for Christmas. When will it be forthcoming, I wonder! You have not deserted it. You cannot be such an unnatural mother.’ 30 Dickens’s jocular reference to Gaskell as the ‘unnatural mother’ could not be more ironically apposite in the context of ‘The Poor Clare’, for this is a story, like so many of Gaskell’s works, about surrogate, non-biological mothers, frequently servants, who are somehow more ‘natural’ parents than the upper-class biological fathers. 31 ‘The Poor Clare’ pits the nurturing, protective and self-sacrificing love of the servant Bridget Fitzgerald for her granddaughter Lucy against the cruel and selfish neglect of Lucy’s father, Squire Gisborne, who rejects his daughter once her ‘demonic’ personality – which he has indirectly ‘sired’ into being – begins to assert itself.
    Bridget’s love for Lucy is echoed by Mrs Clarke, Lucy’s ‘official’ guardian, who seeks to protect her tormented charge from malicious outsiders. In this sense Mrs Clarke is strikingly similar to Hester in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, whose enfolding arms shield the child Rosamund from her ghostly seducer, the little dead girl who is beckoning to Rosamund to join her outside in the snow. Similarly, Amante in ‘The Grey Woman’ takes charge as surrogate mother, husband and, most intriguingly, lover, as her name suggests, when the suicidally docile Anna is too weak to take control over her own life. It is Amante, the lady’s maid, who devises the scheme by which Anna and she can escape Anna’s murderous husband, by posing as wife and husband. Anna is pregnant, and is therefore unable to pass as a man; it is Amante who enacts the role of Anna’s male guide, and thus it is the female servant in male disguise who outwits the dangerously frustrated wealthy bandit, and who acts as adoptive ‘father’ as well as mother to Anna’s newly born child. It seems therefore appropriate that Gaskell, who once wrote under a man’s name, and can so convincingly impersonate a male narrative voice, should write about a female servant acting as a man in