Elizabeth Gaskell was a recurring visitor to and ardent admirer of the English Lake District, its surrounding environs, and cultural history; and much more than this, the Lakeland fells appear as a recurring environment in a range of her short stories. In ‘The Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (1853), the narrator recounts that ‘there [are] no lack of tales’ about individuals getting lost on ‘the wild and desolate Fells’, and this extends to several of her short stories set in the region, including ‘Martha Preston’ (1850), ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), ‘Half a Life-Time Ago’ (1855), and ‘The Half-Brothers’ (1859). This talk will explore Gaskell’s varied depictions of individuals navigating the fells, a setting that can be rendered strange by altitude and climate, to the uninitiated and experienced Laker. Moreover, this lecture will make the case that, through these upland set-pieces, Gaskell was adapting and building on Dorothy Wordsworth’s and Harriet Martineau’s own tragic accounts of George and Sarah Green, a couple who were ‘bewildered’ when crossing the snow-covered Langdale fells in 1808. In tracing Gaskell’s attunement to the uplands of this region, as depicted in her fiction, this talk will highlight the author’s environmental sensibility and situate her work within a tradition of Lakeland literature.

About the speaker

Dr Anna Burton is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Derby. Anna's research is concerned with representations of trees and woodland in nineteenth-century English literature and culture; her book, 'Trees in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel', was published with Routledge in 2021, and her current project focuses on the literary and cultural history of tree planting in the English Lake District. Alongside Dr Amanda Blake Davis, she also co-leads the 'Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840' project and the interdisciplinary 'Tree Talks' seminar series.

Image: Frederick Walker, 'Love in Death' for Good Words, 3.3 (March 1862), 184–85 (p. 185). Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration, Cardiff University