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the psychic division manifested in physical form by the granddaughter she has cursed with her own words. It is surely ironic, though, that Bridget atones for the sexual doubling of her granddaughter by taking on the name of the most famous reformed prostitute in Western culture.
    Moreover, Lucy’s psychic split is re-enacted at the level of the narrative itself. Although the nameless lawyer is the ostensible narrator of the story, parts of the narrative are taken over by other characters directly involved in the events they retell: Lucy’s guardian, Mrs Clarke, takes up some of the story, as does the priest, Father Bernard, who is the confessor to the Starkey family for whom Bridget worked. Most significant, perhaps, are the events that are narrated by Lucy herself, including her description of her double whom we almost immediately witness as the object of the male narrator’s gaze. When Lucy tells her story, however, she describes seeing her dual images reflected in themirror, highlighting the difference between Lucy outside the mirror and the demonic ‘Lucy’ reflected back at her:
    In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged… I suddenly swooned away… even while I lay [in my sickbed] my double was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always about some mischievous or detestable work.
    Thus the fragmented narrative, its various components narrated by different voices, suggests perhaps the loss of authority of the text, just as the above quotation demonstrates Lucy’s loss of authority over her own consciousness. The unstable narrative voice is thus repeated in the instability of the speaking subject at the heart of the text, and here ‘The Poor Clare’ resembles ‘The Grey Woman’, another story of a tale-within-a-tale, where a woman, Anna Scherer, also looks in the mirror, only to be confronted with her sinister, eerily multiple reflections: ‘I caught my own face and figure reflected in all the mirrors, which showed only a mysterious background… I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up.’
    Thus Gaskell here represents the power of consciousness which cannot be controlled, with its multiplicity of reflected images which seem to deny a single source of origin, just as she represents the uncontrollable power of the Word, manifested in the woman’s curse which doubles back on itself. ‘The Poor Clare’ is in this way associated with ‘Lois the Witch’, where language, curse and story-telling rebound back on the otherwise powerless female who curses others in a doomed attempt to stake some sort of authority. Just as in ‘The Poor Clare’ the very intensity of Bridget’s love led her to curse her own granddaughter through the male medium of Squire Gisborne, so too does the mother in ‘Lois the Witch’ unintentionally curse her own daughter when she cries, ‘Oh, Lois, would that thou wert dying with me!’ Like Lucy, Lois is cursed by her beauty and female attractiveness; her accusation as witch is in part motivated by Faith Hickson’s jealousy that Mr Nolan prefers her rival, as well as by Manasseh’s sexual desire which isdistorted by his Calvinist fanaticism into a kind of manic persecution. Thus the Barford witch who cursed Lois as a revenge on Lois’s father is complicitous with the witch-hunters of Salem in damning Lois to death, as does Lois’s own mother with her dying wish. Yet Lois’s last word is the single cry of ‘Mother!’, rather than a cry for her father, suggesting perhaps the same kind of indissoluble bond that so enthralls and torments Bridget Fitzgerald and her lost daughter Mary.
    So, as in ‘The Poor Clare’, ‘Lois the Witch’ demonstrates